Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap targets major scaling upgrades

Ethereum is entering a pivotal phase in 2026 as developers prepare a series of upgrades aimed at significantly improving layer 1 scalability and efficiency.

The Glamsterdam hard fork, expected in mid-2026, is set to introduce perfect parallel transaction processing on the Ethereum network.

Developers plan to raise Ethereum’s gas limit substantially, with targets ranging from 100 million to as high as 200 million by year-end.

A growing share of validators is expected to move away from transaction reexecution and instead verify zero-knowledge proofs.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake estimates around 10% of validators will switch to ZK-based verification after Glamsterdam.

This transition is expected to place Ethereum on a long-term path toward handling up to 10,000 transactions per second on layer 1.

While that throughput will not be reached in 2026, developers see the groundwork being firmly established.

Data blobs are also expected to increase sharply, potentially reaching 72 or more per block.

Higher blob capacity will allow layer 2 networks to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

Layer 2 usability is improving alongside scaling, with upgrades enabling faster execution while funds remain secured on mainnet.

Ethereum developers are also working on an interoperability layer to enable seamless cross-chain interaction between L2s.

Privacy and censorship resistance are emerging as parallel priorities alongside raw performance improvements.

Block Access Lists are a core feature of Glamsterdam and will enable true parallel block execution.

The upgrade allows Ethereum clients to process multiple transactions simultaneously without state conflicts.

With Block Access List, we are getting all the state that changes from transaction to transaction, and you are putting that information in the block.

Gabriel Trintinalia said.

This approach reduces disk access bottlenecks by allowing clients to preload data into memory.

Perfect parallel processing enables higher throughput without proportionally raising gas costs.

Glamsterdam will also integrate Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation directly into Ethereum’s consensus layer.

The change builds on existing MEV Boost infrastructure, which currently handles the majority of block production.

Enshrined PBS aims to reduce centralisation pressure from maximal extractable value while improving security.

The upgrade also gives validators more time to receive and verify zero-knowledge proofs.

This makes opt-in zkAttesting much more incentive compatible for validators.

Ladislaus von Daniels said.

Ethereum’s gas limit has already risen to 60 million and is expected to climb further in 2026

I think in 2026, I would expect to see 100 million fairly soon.

Gary Schulte said.

Tomasz Stańczak said the limit could double to 200 million following the rollout of Enshrined PBS.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin cautioned that gas growth may be more targeted rather than uniform.

Later in 2026, the Heze-Bogota fork is expected to focus on censorship resistance rather than scaling.

The fork is likely to include Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists, empowering validators to enforce transaction inclusion.

That is a censorship resistance mechanism that ensures that if at least you have part of the network that’s honest, then you’re going to have your transaction included.

Gabriel Trintinalia said.

Developers say the combined upgrades reflect Ethereum’s shift toward sustainable scaling and decentralisation.

At the time of reporting, Ethereum price was $2,898.44.