Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap focuses on two tracks: expanding data capacity through blobs, while increasing base layer execution through changes to gas limits.
These changes to the throttle limits depend on the extent to which validators move from re-executing blocks to verifying ZK execution proofs.
The first issue is already anchored by Fusaka, which shipped on December 3, 2025.
Fusaka
Fusaka sets PeerDAS plus blob parameter only (BPO) changes that can increase blob throughput in measured increments, according to ethereum.org.
The second track is less mechanized as it relies on draft EIPs, client deployment, and validator operations that must stay within decentralization constraints, including bandwidth, block propagation, and proving market structure.
PeerDAS is positioned as the clearest lever for ramping up capacity because it is designed to scale the availability of federated data without forcing every node to download every blob.
According to ethereum.orgBlob targets don’t jump immediately upon activation, but can then double them every few weeks up to a maximum target of 48 while developers monitor network health.
The team at Optimism formulated the upper bound as “at least 48 blob targets per block,” combined with a rollup-side throughput move from about 220 to about 3,500 UOPS below that target, according to optimism.io.
Even in that context, the practical question for 2026 is whether demand comes as blob usage rather than a bid for L1 execution.
Another open question is whether P2P stability and node bandwidth will remain within operators’ tolerances as BPO scales up deployment.
On the execution side, Ethereum is already testing higher throughput through coordination rather than a hard fork.
GasLimit.pics reported a final gas limit of 60,000,000, with a 24-hour average of approximately 59,990,755 at the time shown.
That level matters because it provides a reference point for what validators have accepted in practice.
It also exposes the ceiling of ‘social scaling’ before latency, validation burden, and pressure on the mempool and MEV pipeline become binding.
A simple way to translate gas limit conversations into throughput ranges is gas per second, which uses Ethereum’s 12 second slot time (gas per second is equal to the gas limit divided by 12).
The numbers below keep the math explicit and separate base-tier EVM transactions from total throughput claims.
| Scenario | Gas limit | Gas/sec (≈ gas/12) | Tx/sec at 21k gas | Tx/sec at 120k throttle |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Current level of coordination | 60,000,000 | 5,000,000 | ≈238 | ≈42 |
| 2× gas limit case | 120,000,000 | 10,000,000 | ≈476 | ≈83 |
| High performance enclosure (requires validation change) | 200,000,000 | 16,666,667 | ≈793 | ≈139 |
Glamsterdam
The planned 2026 upgrade branding wraps several execution-oriented ideas into “Glamsterdam,” an acronym that has been discussed around the established proposer-builder divide (ePBS, EIP-7732), block-level access lists (BALs, EIP-7928), and general repricings (EIP-7904).
Each remains in draft form, according to the EIP pages for EIP-7732, EIP-7928And EIP-7904.
The price revision is aimed at mismatches in the gas schedule that have persisted for years.
It argues that correcting mispriced compute can increase usable throughput while recognizing the DoS risk and reality of contracts that hardcode gas assumptions. EIP-7904.
BALs are designed as plumbing for parallelism.
The EIP mentions parallel disk reads, parallel transaction validation, parallel state-root computation and “executionless state updates,” while estimating the average compressed BAL size to be around 70 to 72 KiB as overhead, the EIP said. EIP-7928.
In practice, these benefits are only realized when customers adopt concurrency across real bottlenecks.
They also depend on whether the extra data and verification steps don’t become their own latency burden.
ePBS is central to both MEV and throughput discussions because it aims to decouple execution validation from consensus validation over time, according to EIP-7732.
This temporary slack is also the place where new failure modes can arise.
An academic paper on the ‘free options problem’ for ePBS estimates that option exercises average about 0.82% of blocks within an 8-second option window, reaching about 6% on high-volatility days in the modeled conditions. arXiv.
Ethereum in 2026
For 2026 planning, that study draws attention to liveliness under stress, not just stable compensation.
The more structural commitment behind ‘very high’ gas limits is the adoption of the validator ZK-proof.
The Ethereum Foundation’s “Realtime Proving” roadmap describes a phased path where a small group of validators first runs ZK clients in production.
Only after a vast majority of shares are comfortable can throttle limits rise to levels where proof verification replaces reexecution for practical validation on reasonable hardware, according to the foundation’s July 10, 2025 post at blog.ethereum.org.
The same post outlines limitations that are more important for feasibility than narrative, including targeting 128-bit security (temporarily accepting 100-bit), keeping the sample size below 300 KiB, and avoiding reliance on recursive wrappers with trusted setups, according to blog.ethereum.org.
The implication of scaling is related to proving markets: the real-time evidence offering must be cheap and credible, without concentrating in a limited set of evidence that reconstructs contemporary dependencies in another layer of the stack.
After Glamsterdam, “Hegota” is positioned as a later 2026 slot that is still more about process than reach.
The Ethereum Foundation published a headlining timeline with a proposal window from January 8 to February 4, followed by a discussion and wrap-up from February 5 to February 26, and then a window for non-headliners, according to blog.ethereum.org.
A Hegotá meta-EIP exists as a draft (EIP-8081) and lists items as considered rather than locked, including FOCIL (EIP-7805) as currently considered, according EIP-8081.
The short-term reporting value in that scheme is that it creates dated decision points that investors and builders can follow without inferring obligations from code names.
The first is that Hegota’s headlining proposals close on February 4.