Ethereum core developers have agreed on a 200 million gas limit floor for the network’s post-Glamsterdam future, following a week-long interoperability event held in Svalbard, Norway — a target they say will significantly boost transaction throughput as ETH trades around $2,292.
The gathering brought together engineers from multiple client teams to finalise scalability upgrades and advance the infrastructure underpinning Ethereum’s next phase of growth.
Glamsterdam is Ethereum’s next scheduled hard fork, targeting improvements in trustless execution, censorship resistance, and parallel transaction processing. It follows the Fusaka upgrade, which rolled out to mainnet in December 2025 and introduced PeerDAS technology.
Ethereum targets 200M gas limit
One of the biggest developments from the event was the establishment of a credible 200 million gas limit floor for Ethereum’s post-Glamsterdam future.
Developers said the target was achieved through convergence across several technical initiatives, including ePBS optimisations, Block-Auction Lookahead (BAL) improvements — which allow validators to plan block production further ahead — and EIP-8037 repricing adjustments.
The Ethereum Foundation stated that the work is intended to significantly improve transaction throughput and network efficiency while supporting future demand from decentralized applications and institutional-scale blockchain activity.
ePBS and EIP-8037 major milestones
Ethereum developers also confirmed that ePBS (enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) has now stabilized across a multi-client Glamsterdam development network. Ethereum’s current gas limit sits at approximately 36 million — meaning the proposed target represents a more than fivefold increase in network capacity.
The update noted that external builder pipelines were tested end-to-end across nearly all Ethereum clients, marking a major interoperability milestone for the network.
Meanwhile, EIP-8037 was finalized with developers adopting a fixed “cost_per_state_byte” structure to improve state pricing and execution consistency.
The Ethereum Foundation said full repricing figures were successfully delivered during testing on bal-devnet-6.
Foundation leadership transition
The interoperability event also marked the beginning of a leadership transition within the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol cluster.
The Foundation announced that Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik will become the new leads overseeing the Protocol cluster moving forward.
The leadership change comes at a pivotal point for Ethereum, with two upgrade phases — Glamsterdam and the early-stage Hegotá, in simultaneous development for the first time.
The organization credited outgoing leaders Barnabé Monnot, Tim Beiko, and Alex Stokes for helping coordinate major upgrades, including the rollout of Fusaka to the Ethereum mainnet in December 2025.
That upgrade introduced PeerDAS technology and contributed to Ethereum’s broader scalability roadmap.
Turns toward Hegotá and account abstraction
Ethereum developers also revealed that groundwork for the next upgrade phase, known as “Hegotá,” is already underway.
According to the update, Developers are actively testing FOCIL (Fork-Choice enforced Inclusion Lists) prototypes — a mechanism designed to prevent transaction censorship at the validator level, alongside native account abstraction, which would allow Ethereum accounts to run custom smart-contract logic without a separate relay layer.
The Foundation stated that FOCIL is expected to become a headline feature on the consensus layer side of the future upgrade.
Earlier in January, Ethereum developers also outlined Glamsterdam as the network’s next major upgrade, focused on trustless execution, censorship resistance, and parallel transaction processing.
With Glamsterdam’s testnet phase approaching and Hegotá already in early prototyping, Ethereum’s development roadmap is running on two parallel tracks simultaneously — an unusual pace that developers say reflects growing urgency to keep Ethereum competitive with rival high-throughput chains.
Also read: Polygon Pushes Scalability Further With 140M Gas Upgrade
