Ethereum's Glamsterdam Upgrade Development Progresses, Expected to Activate on Mainnet in the First Half of the Year

BlockBeats News, May 4th, Ethereum's Glamsterdam Upgrade Development Accelerates. According to the latest summary from the Ethereum Foundation, key upgrade objectives have been largely achieved, including reaching a 200 million Gas limit consensus, stabilizing the ePBS external builder process, and determining the EIP-8037 parameters. Most clients have achieved stable operation on the testnet.

The upgrade is expected to be activated on the mainnet in the first half of 2026 (June), making it Ethereum's largest performance upgrade since the "Merge." By then, the block Gas limit will increase from the current 60 million to 200 million, marking the largest historical capacity expansion, theoretically increasing on-chain throughput to 10,000 TPS.

To address the state bloat and node operation pressure brought by the expansion, the upgrade will concurrently introduce Verkle Trees and a State Expunging mechanism, allowing nodes to remove historical data older than one year, which will be handled by decentralized storage and archival nodes to maintain the stability of validator node hardware requirements. Additionally, the base fee smoothing mechanism will reduce the risk of sharp fluctuations in Gas fees.

The expansion is also expected to have a significant impact on the Layer 2 ecosystem. Benefiting from the reduced mainnet data settlement costs, Rollup fees are expected to decrease by around 70%, driving cost competition among mainstream L2 solutions such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base. Analysts believe that this upgrade will further position the Ethereum mainnet as a high-security settlement layer, with L2 networks handling high-frequency, low-cost transaction execution, forming a two-layer architecture of "L1 settlement + L2 execution."

It is worth noting that the upgrade timeline may be subject to variables. Developers indicate that if the progress of key component testing falls behind expectations, the mainnet activation may be delayed until the second half of the year. Core developers will continue to advance client hardening, testing, and code merging work, and the final parameter confirmation will be announced at the AllCoreDevs meeting.