Ethereum had two significant upgrades in 2025, Pectra and Fusaka, which were successfully completed. In 2026, Ethereum's schedule remains tight, with two major upgrades (hard forks) planned: Glamsterdam (around mid-year) and Heze-Bogota (around the end of the year). These upgrades aim to further improve Ethereum's TPS, privacy, and security.
The Glamsterdam upgrade aims to make Ethereum faster and cheaper, mainly by addressing several aspects: parallel processing, increasing gas limits, and ZK proof verification.
Parallel processing means that Ethereum is currently like a one-way street, processing transactions one by one, which can easily lead to congestion. Parallel processing, on the other hand, is like having multiple lanes running simultaneously, allowing multiple transactions to be processed at the same time. This can significantly increase Ethereum's speed.
The increase in GAS limits, where Gas is the "fuel" for transactions, currently has 60 million units per block, but after the upgrade, it can be increased to 200 million (or even 300 million), thus allowing Ethereum to pack more transactions into a single block.
ZK proof verification, unlike previous methods where verifiers had to repeatedly rerun all transactions to check for correctness, allows for direct verification of results. This saves time, effort, and money, making it more efficient.
With parallel processing, gas price caps, and ZK proof verification, if the upgrade can be completed as planned in 2026 (this premise is crucial), Ethereum L1 has the potential to gradually achieve TPS.
With the target of 10,000, and the continued expansion of Blob (potentially reaching 72 or more), L2 TPS has also increased significantly. After the 2026 upgrade, the performance of the Ethereum ecosystem will be basically able to support various current application scenarios.
The Heze-Bogota upgrade is primarily aimed at addressing shortcomings in privacy and security.
For example, the introduction of Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) allows multiple validators to work together to force certain transactions into blocks, ensuring that transactions can pass smoothly even if malicious actors try to censor them, thus improving resilience against suppression; it also strengthens privacy protection, making transaction details less likely to be spied on by others, for example through better encryption or anonymity technologies; and it promotes decentralization, reducing dependence on a few large nodes, making the entire network more distributed and less susceptible to manipulation or attack.
The above is only a current outlook, and the specific implementation may change over time. Please keep an eye on the progress of the specific implementation plan.
