Ethereum’s Next Upgrade Could Change How Fast It Can Really Go

What Happened

Ethereum’s next big upgrade is Glamsterdam, currently planned for Q4 2026. It includes protocol changes designed to make larger blocks easier to process and prepare Ethereum for substantially higher L1 throughput. Ethereum developers have identified a post-upgrade gas limit around 200 million as a target, compared with 60 million today.

What makes this upgrade so important? Ethereum by far has the largest developer base in the blockchain space, but its speed and cost still lag.

A stronger base chain also changes the calculation facing applications that currently launch on rollups or their own chains.

Market Context

With on-chain activities exploding across every vertical, high-performance chains have become serious destinations for trading, payments and consumer applications.

More Usable L1 Capacity

Federico Variola, CEO of Phemex, sees decentralized trading as one of the areas where Ethereum’s next steps could prove particularly important.

Applications such as decentralized exchanges place unusually heavy demands on blockchains because users expect fast execution, deep liquidity and costs low enough to support frequent transactions.

“There has been meaningful progress, but there have also been many failures over the past few years, and these have drained a significant amount of capital and activity from the Ethereum ecosystem.”

The challenge is therefore to turn higher capacity into consistently faster and cheaper execution while keeping validator requirements accessible.

Increasing Ethereum’s gas limit creates an obvious engineering hurdle. Bigger blocks give applications more execution capacity, while validators need enough computing power to process those blocks within Ethereum’s fixed slot times.

Ethereum itself identifies validator hardware as one of the constraints on L1 throughput. Increasing the amount of work contained in each block can eventually price smaller operators out of running nodes, concentrating validation among professional operators with more powerful machines.

Why It Matters

Variola believes decentralized exchanges could become an important measure of whether this effort succeeds.

Longer-term zkEVM verification could allow validators to verify cryptographic proofs instead of re-executing every transaction, reducing the computational burden of higher throughput.

Details

“As regulators are increasingly forced to engage with decentralized exchanges such as Hyperliquid, it will be very important for Ethereum to remain decentralized while also offering a reasonable level of speed and avoiding high costs.”

Ethereum has addressed much of this demand through Layer 2 networks. Variola describes the results as mixed.

Ethereum already doubled its gas limit from roughly 30 million in early 2025 to 60 million following successive protocol improvements. Developers are now preparing the network for another much larger increase.

“For ETH, I think the next major battle will be creating the conditions for decentralized exchanges to flourish, especially as regulators begin engaging more seriously with these instruments.”

The Hardware Problem of Higher Throughput

Glamsterdam attacks the problem from several directions:

Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928) give clients advance information about which accounts and storage locations a block will touch, allowing more disk reads, transaction processing and state calculations to happen in parallel;

Enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) reorganizes how blocks are constructed and validated. Combined with Block-Level Access Lists, it is intended to help Ethereum process more data on L1 without increasing validator workloads as sharply;

State-growth controls (EIP-8037) change the economics of creating a permanent state. Developers are targeting roughly 120 GiB of annual state growth even if the gas limit rises toward 200 million, helping keep node operation within reach of ordinary hardware;

In short, Ethereum’s L1 scaling effort depends on making execution more efficient.

The Role of Rollups on a Faster Ethereum