According to reports, Ethereum is planning two major hard forks in 2026 that aim to change the way the network works. The Glamsterdam upgrade will see mid-2026, and late 2026 is planned for Heze-Bogota. These steps aim to speed up transaction processing, add new validation tools, and make the chain more difficult to censor.
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Ethereum trading, pressure on options
Ethereum currently sits above $2,900 as the market awaits the expiration of a large quantity of options. Reports put the expiring notional at $6 billion, with more calls than puts. Many contracts could become worthless if ETH does not rise above $3,100, the so-called maximum pain level.
Analysts predict a consolidation range between $2,700 and $3,100 through the end of the year, and some experts offer a bearish view for 2026, highlighting possible declines between $1,800 and $2,000 if overall market conditions deteriorate.
Parallel execution
Glamsterdam targets parallel processing by allowing multiple transactions to execute at the same time rather than one after the other. Blocked access lists will tell nodes what data each transaction needs, making parallel work safer and more efficient.
Ethereum will undergo key upgrades in 2026, with the Glamsterdam fork enabling parallel processing and increasing the gas limit to 200 million, up from 60 million. Validators will move to ZK proof validation, paving the way for Ethereum L1 to reach 10,000 transactions per…
-Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) December 25, 2025
Proposer-builder separation at the protocol level, or ePBS, is also planned. This decision should reduce some centralization risks and make it easier for validators to use zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs without being penalized by additional calculation time.
Gas limits are expected to increase in stages, and there is talk of reaching 200 million per block after the key changes arrive. About 10% of validators could begin verifying ZK proofs rather than reverifying all transactions by the end of the year, based on current projections.
The push toward parallel execution could reduce slowdowns that occur when demand increases. But higher gas limits come with trade-offs. Running larger blocks or faster workloads may increase hardware requirements, which could make it harder for smaller validators to stay on the network. This balance between speed and decentralization will be closely monitored.
Layer 2 throughput could increase significantly
A big part of the story is Layer 2 scaling. Increasing the number of data blobs per block to 72 or more would give L2 systems much more space to store transaction data, which could allow them to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second in total.
Designs like ZKsync’s Elastic Network aim to allow users to hold money on Ethereum while using faster L2s. An interoperability layer is also being discussed to more easily move activity between different L2s. Still, user experience, liquidity distribution, and cross-chain coordination remain open questions that need work.
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Heze-Bogota: Resistance to censorship
Heze-Bogota will add tools to help validator groups ensure certain transactions are included. Randomized inclusion lists aim to reduce the risk of transactions being blocked if only part of the network remains honest. This change is more about values and unauthorized access than raw speed.
Featured image of Firi, chart by TradingView
