Ethereum Prepares for 2026 Transformation with Glumsterdam and Heze-Bogota Forks

TLDR

The Glamsterdam fork introduced access lists that enabled fully parallel transaction processing capabilities.
The gas limit expansion from 60 million to 200 million will accelerate Ethereum's path to its 10,000 TPS target.
Approximately 10% of verifiers transition to zero-knowledge verification after an implementation upgrade.
The Heze-Bogota fork implements Fork-Choice Inclusion specifications to strengthen network censorship resistance mechanisms.

Ethereum developers are planning two major network upgrades for 2026 that will shape the blockchain's processing power and decentralized features.

By mid-2026, the planned Glumsterdam Fork could increase its gas capacity from 60 million to 200 million by introducing parallel processing technology. This update represents a significant step towards enabling Ethereum's Layer 1 to handle 10,000 transactions per second.

Upcoming changes will shift verification tasks from transaction re-execution to zero-knowledge verification verification.

In addition, the Heze-Bogotá fork will arrive later in the year with a focus on privacy improvements and censorship countermeasures.

The Glamsterdam fork brings parallel processing and gas boundary expansion

The Glumsterdam hard fork focuses on two key Ethereum reform proposals that fundamentally change how the network works.

The access lists, designated as EIP-7928, enable fully parallel block processing across multiple CPU cores. This technology replaces Ethereum's single-lane transaction process with a multi-lane highway.

Block producers create detailed maps showing transaction interactions and changes for each block. These maps allow network clients to process multiple transactions simultaneously without collisions or delays.

According to Gabriel Tritinalia, senior blockchain engineer at Consensys, the update will deliver all state changes from transaction to block. He explained that the system avoids the biggest bottleneck by loading the necessary information into memory instead of reading it sequentially from disk.

The second major component, Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation, integrates the block builder and proposer functions directly into Ethereum's consensus layer.

This change goes beyond MEV Boost's centralized relay system, which currently handles about 90% of the blocks. The separation allows more time for zero-knowledge authentication generation and validation on the network.

According to Ethereum researcher Ladislaus von Daniel, the system prevents attestation from performing against walls, making opt-in zkAttesting even more incentivized for attesters.

Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation says that approximately 10% of validators will receive ZK verification after implementation.

Gas restrictions and censorship resistance take center stage.

In the year Network gas limits will see significant increases when the reforms come into force in 2026. Gary Schulte, a senior staff blockchain protocol engineer at Besu Client, expects the limit to reach exactly 100 million.

He added that delayed execution would enable higher gas limits. Ethereum Foundation co-director Thomas Stanczak said the limit will be doubled to 200 million following the implementation of proposer-developer separation.

Layer 2 scaling solutions benefit from data pollution capabilities that can reach 72 or more per block.

This expansion allows Layer 2 networks to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. ZKsync's Atlas upgrade demonstrates its practical implementation by allowing mainnet funds to trade in fast execution environments.

The Heze-Bogota fork responds to censorship resistance through fork-selective inclusion details. This method empowers multiple validators to enforce specific transaction inclusions in each block.

Trintinalia describes it as a censorship-resistant mechanism that ensures transaction inclusion if at least part of the network remains trustworthy. The proposed Ethereum Interoperability Layer will facilitate seamless cross-chain operations between Layer 2 solutions, completing a year-long update cycle.