Ethereum's biggest protocol overhaul since the Merge targets Q3 2026, bringing on-chain proposer-builder separation, parallel transactions, and gas costs cut by up to 71%.
Ethereum is heading into its most consequential protocol overhaul since the Merge, and the upgrade now has a name: Glamsterdam. After missing its original first-half target, the hard fork is officially tracking for Q3 2026 — with a stable multi-client devnet live and public testnets the next milestone before mainnet. The upgrade rewires how blocks are built, enables parallel transaction processing, and cuts the cost of a basic ETH transfer by up to 71%.
What Is Glamsterdam?
Glamsterdam is Ethereum's next scheduled hard fork, combining execution-layer improvements codenamed "Gloas" with networking protocol changes. It bundles more than a dozen Ethereum Improvement Proposals around three strategic pillars: parallelization, capacity expansion, and long-term network sustainability.
The upgrade targets three core structural problems that have limited Ethereum for years: centralized block-building through off-chain relays, sequential transaction processing that caps L1 throughput, and gas pricing that no longer reflects modern hardware costs. According to the official Ethereum Foundation roadmap, Glamsterdam aims to resolve all three simultaneously.
EIP-7732: Bringing Block-Building On-Chain
The most consequential proposal in Glamsterdam is EIP-7732, which enshrines Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) directly into the Ethereum protocol.
Today, approximately 88% of Ethereum blocks are assembled through MEV-Boost — an off-chain relay system where specialized builders compete to construct maximally profitable blocks and pay validators for the right to include them. The system works, but it creates structural risk: relays are centralized, trust-based, and operate entirely outside Ethereum's security guarantees. If a major relay censors transactions, delays payloads, or collapses, the protocol has no on-chain recourse.
EIP-7732 eliminates this dependency. Builders gain cryptographic on-chain identities, submit signed bids directly to the protocol, and are held accountable by a new validator subcommittee — the Payload Timeliness Committee (PTC) — which attests that block payloads arrive on schedule. The data propagation window expands from 2 seconds to approximately 9 seconds, creating room for larger, denser blocks.
The practical effects are significant:
- MEV extraction becomes more transparent — builder competition moves on-chain, out of opaque relay agreements
- Censorship resistance improves — no single off-chain relay can quietly exclude transactions at scale without on-chain evidence
- Relay dependency eliminated — validators no longer need to trust external infrastructure to participate in block production
EIP-7928: Parallel Transactions and the Path to Higher Throughput
Ethereum currently executes transactions sequentially. Every transaction must complete before the next begins — a constraint that caps L1 throughput regardless of hardware improvements.
EIP-7928 introduces Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) to break this limit. Before execution, a BAL maps every account address and storage slot that a given block will interact with, along with expected post-execution state values. Nodes receive this map upfront, enabling them to identify independent transactions and process them simultaneously across CPU cores.
BALs also enable executionless state reconstruction for light clients — nodes that track Ethereum's state without replaying every transaction. This reduces syncing overhead and lowers the hardware barrier to running a full node, which improves decentralization at the node-operator level.
The throughput implication: BALs create a credible technical pathway to raise Ethereum's gas limit from roughly 60 million per block today toward 200 million — approximately triple current capacity. That ceiling lift compounds across every L2 that settles on Ethereum's base layer, enabling more transactions to be committed at lower cost.
Gas Repricing: 71% Cheaper ETH Transfers
EIP-2780 cuts the intrinsic gas overhead on a basic ETH transfer by approximately 71%. The current 21,000 gas unit baseline was set years ago and, as Phemex's technical breakdown notes, it no longer reflects how much computation a simple transfer requires on modern infrastructure.
EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 recalibrate state costs alongside the transfer repricing. State creation costs increase modestly to discourage unbounded state accumulation — the official sustainability target is no more than 120 GiB per year of state growth. State access costs fall to reflect modern storage performance.
The result is a more rational fee structure: users pay less for common operations, while the protocol captures appropriate costs for activities that burden long-term state storage.
Additional Changes in the Bundle
Beyond the three headline EIPs, Glamsterdam packages over 25 additional EIPs addressing operational friction points for validators, developers, and infrastructure operators:
- EIP-8045 excludes slashed validators from proposing blocks, tightening network integrity during their exit period
- EIP-8080 allows standard exits to access the consolidation queue's capacity, potentially accelerating validator exits by up to 2.5× during peak demand
- EIP-7997 introduces a deterministic factory predeploy, ensuring smart contracts deploy to identical addresses across all EVM-compatible chains — a long-standing multi-chain developer pain point
- EIP-7708 makes native ETH transfers and burns emit on-chain logs, improving traceability for wallets and analytics platforms that currently infer native transfers from state diffs
- EIP-8159 (eth/71) introduces a new peer-to-peer networking protocol for distributing block access lists across the Ethereum node network
Where Glamsterdam Stands Now
As of mid-June 2026, the upgrade has cleared its first major checkpoint. The Soldøgn interop devnet wrapped up May 2, and a stable multi-client Glamsterdam devnet is now operational — with client teams across Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Prysm, and Lighthouse running the upgrade simultaneously. This is the stage where cross-client incompatibilities surface and get resolved before the network moves to public testnets.
The next milestones before mainnet activation:
- Public testnet deployment on Sepolia and Hoodi (timing not yet announced)
- Dual audit phases covering execution-layer and consensus-layer changes
- Mainnet activation targeted for Q3 2026
The official Ethereum Foundation roadmap now targets H2 2026 — a shift from the H1 target that circulated earlier this year. The timeline change reflects the complexity of ePBS, which required multiple rounds of specification refinement to ensure compatibility with Ethereum's existing attestation model.
One notable deferral: FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists) — a proposal to further strengthen censorship resistance — was pushed to the next upgrade, Hegotá. The Base engineering team had flagged that including FOCIL alongside ePBS would likely push mainnet activation past 2026. Deferring it keeps Glamsterdam on track without sacrificing the more mature EIPs.
What This Means for Investors
Glamsterdam arrives at an uncomfortable moment for ETH. The token has underperformed Bitcoin materially since January 2026. Spot Ethereum ETFs logged a 17-day outflow streak in early June. Macro headwinds are real, and the FOMC decision this week is holding risk assets in check.
But protocol development and price action operate on different clocks. Ethereum's upgrade cadence has been strong: Dencun in March 2024 cut L2 fees by over 90%. Pectra in early 2025 brought validator consolidation and smart account improvements. Glamsterdam would be the third major upgrade in two years — and arguably the most structurally significant of the three, given the depth of the MEV and parallelization changes.
The MEV problem ePBS addresses is not abstract. Retail users on Ethereum are routinely sandwich-attacked on DEXs, pay inflated gas during congestion as sophisticated bots capture priority, and are subject to soft censorship by relay operators navigating OFAC compliance. Moving builder competition on-chain creates a more transparent market structure — the kind of structural improvement that builds institutional confidence over time, even if it doesn't move price in a single news cycle.
Historical precedent offers a rough guide. In the weeks before Dencun activated in Q1 2024, ETH gained approximately 60% — driven by pre-fork positioning and coincident macro tailwinds. A Q3 Glamsterdam activation would land during a period that could see elevated institutional inflows, particularly if the five Ethereum staking ETFs currently approaching SEC approval clear their final hurdles and begin accumulating assets.
The key risk is timing. Glamsterdam was supposed to arrive in H1 — it didn't. If public testnets surface unexpected interactions between ePBS and the consensus layer, Q3 becomes Q4. Investors treating the upgrade as a near-term catalyst should price that uncertainty in.
What isn't uncertain is the direction. Every EIP in Glamsterdam moves Ethereum toward a more decentralized, higher-capacity, and cheaper-to-use network. That structural progress tends to be undervalued when it's in development — and recognized in retrospect, once it's live.
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