• Ethereum’s Glamsterdam fork will increase gas limits to 200 million and enable parallel transaction processing.
• Validators will shift to ZK proof validation, paving the way for faster L1 throughput.
• Heze-Bogota fork focuses on privacy, censorship resistance, and enhanced decentralization.

Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap is centered on two major network upgrades, starting with the Glamsterdam fork, expected mid-year. 

This upgrade will bring parallel transaction processing and a significant gas limit increase, from 60 million to 200 million, potentially supporting even higher limits by the year’s end.

Source: Growthepie

A core feature, Block Access Lists (EIP-7928), allows Ethereum to execute multiple transactions simultaneously by mapping which transactions affect which accounts and storage slots.

Gabriel Trintinalia, a senior blockchain engineer at Consensys, explained that this will resolve long-standing bottlenecks by preloading data into memory, enabling faster execution without increasing gas costs.

Also Read: Ethereum Lags Behind Bitcoin as Past Cycle Pattern Repeats in 2025

Ethereum Introduces ePBS to Reduce Centralization

Other significant changes include Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation (ePBS). This is because Ethereum separates block builders and proposers to reduce centralization pressure created by MEV and increase time for validators to verify zero-knowledge ZK proofs.

A strategy proposed by Ethereum researcher Ladislaus von Daniels will make ZK validation more attractive, thus enabling roughly 10% of the validators on the network to use ZK validation methods next year, said Justin from the Ethereum Foundation.

These changes altogether put Ethereum Layer 1 on a trajectory to reach an aim of processing 10,000 transactions per second in the future.

Source: Growthepie

The layer 2 networks are also set to acquire more blobs of data, with a possible total of 72 per block, allowing them to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

Heze-Bogota Fork: Privacy and Decentralization in Focus

Coming after Glamsterdam, the Heze-Bogota fork is scheduled for late 2026. It aims at privacy provisions, resisting censorship, and promoting more decentralization.

The most discussed concept at this point is Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists (FOCIL). It allows many validators to combine their powers to verify transactions while certain sections of the network are not entirely reliable.

Gas limits may increase to 200 million after ePBS and could go up to 300 million by the end of this year, according to Tomasz Stańczak, co-director of the Ethereum Foundation.

But according to Vitalik Buterin, growth is not going to be even and is going to lead to inefficient operations and large contracts. Such upgrades and the plans to add interoperability layers to the Layer 2s are expected to improve the scalability and speed of Ethereum and its resistance against censorship.

Source: Growthepie

Also Read: Solana and Ethereum Poised to Explode as Tokenization Accelerates