Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade targets 200M gas limit in Q3 2026

Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork will raise the network's gas limit more than threefold to 200 million, the biggest single capacity expansion since The Merge.

Ethereum's Glamsterdam protocol upgrade, delayed to Q3 2026, will raise the gas limit to 200 million from roughly 60 million, the Ethereum Foundation said Monday.

"Reaching a credible post-Glamsterdam target of 200 million gas was a key step forward for the network's scalability roadmap," the Foundation said in a blog post.

The upgrade incorporates enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or ePBS, which integrates block-building separation directly into Ethereum's protocol rules, reducing reliance on external relay services. A separate finalized proposal, EIP-8037, raises the cost of state creation operations to prevent excessive state growth under the higher gas limits. The maximum bytecode size for smart contracts will also increase, expanding design space for complex DeFi routing protocols and account abstraction on Ethereum.

The changes position Ethereum to process larger blocks without compromising decentralization, directly addressing a key bottleneck that has constrained throughput since the network's transition to proof-of-stake in 2022. Work on the subsequent upgrade, Hegotà, is already underway, with the Foundation simultaneously advancing the Strawmap, its quantum-resistant long-term roadmap.

Kirill Kuznetsov, Senior Solution Architect at 1inch, said the upgrade makes the network more efficient and indexable without altering the direct user experience. Native ETH transfers will begin emitting logs for the first time, allowing indexers, explorers, and wallets to track ETH movements with the same simplicity as ERC-20 tokens — a change that eliminates a persistent source of friction for analytics teams building transaction histories and DeFi dashboards.

Per-block access lists will let clients preload accounts and storage slots before execution, laying the groundwork for parallel execution that has historically limited Ethereum's performance. The gas model revision makes computationally intensive operations cheaper while raising costs for operations that generate state growth, a shift Kuznetsov said will require developers to revise their gas assumptions before the upgrade takes effect.

On the leadership side, the Foundation named Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik as new leads for its Protocol cluster. Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko are departing, while Alex Stokes will take a sabbatical.

The Glamsterdam upgrade represents Ethereum's most consequential technical overhaul since the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, which introduced proto-danksharding and reduced L2 fees. For DeFi protocols on Ethereum, the higher gas ceiling and native ETH logs remove two structural constraints that have limited application design and data indexing since the network's inception.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.