Ethereum In 2026: Glamsterdam And Hegota Forks, L1 Scaling And More

The coming year will see perfect parallel processing, big increases in the gas limit and number of data blobs, and 10% of Ethereum’s network switching to ZK.

Ethereum developers are currently finalizing what Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) should be included in the Glamsterdam hard fork, expected in mid-2026. The confirmed headliner changes are Block Access Lists and Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation. Neither sounds particularly interesting, but they have the potential to supercharge the blockchain ahead of the switch to ZK tech.At some point, the core devs will come up with cool names for stuff like “Firedancer,” but until then, we’re stuck with whatever boring technical names they choose.

Although “block access lists” sound like a censorship scheme, the upgrade actually makes “perfect” parallel block processing possible.

To date, Ethereum has been running in single-lane mode, with a very long queue of transactions executed in order, one after the other. Block Access Lists enable throughput to scale up to a multi-lane highway, with multiple transactions processed at the same time.

The term refers to a map included in each block that was devised by the block producer, who executed everything first on some fancy high-end equipment. The map tells Ethereum clients which transactions affect which other transactions, accounts and storage slots and what the state differentials are after the transaction. This allows them to parcel up the transactions and run them on multiple CPU cores simultaneously without any conflicts.

Related: Blockchains quietly prepare for quantum threat as Bitcoin debates timeline“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,” explained Gabriel Trintinalia, senior blockchain engineer with Consensys, who is working on execution client Besu.

It also enables clients to preload all the necessary data from disk into memory first, rather than keep going back to read the disk sequentially, which Trintinalia calls “the biggest bottleneck we have.”

Perfect parallel processing will enable Ethereum to run at higher transactions per second and have bigger block sizes without raising the gas limit.

The process of separating block builders and proposers has already begun with MEV Boost, an out-of-protocol solution that uses centralized relays as intermediaries and handles approximately 90% of blocks. Enshrined Proposer Builder Separa

Source: CoinTelegraph