Ethereum's key upgrades in 2026 preview: Glamsterdam and Heze-Bogota will reshape performance and censorship resistance

2026 is regarded as a milestone year for Ethereum. According to the current roadmap, Ethereum plans to complete two major hard fork upgrades within this year: Glamsterdam in mid-year and Heze-Bogota at the end of the year. The core objectives of these upgrades are to comprehensively enhance the speed, efficiency, and censorship resistance of the Ethereum network, while laying a technical foundation for long-term scalability.

Overall, the 2026 Ethereum upgrades will focus on parallel execution, increasing the Gas limit, and introducing zero-knowledge proof (ZK) mechanisms at the validator layer. Through these improvements, the theoretical processing capacity of Ethereum Layer 1 is expected to approach 10,000 transactions per second, while Layer 2 networks could reach throughput of hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, supporting large-scale applications.

The Glamsterdam hard fork is expected to be implemented in mid-2026. One of its key changes is the introduction of a “block access list.” This mechanism clearly specifies which on-chain data each transaction will access, enabling multiple transactions to be safely executed in parallel across multiple CPU cores. This means Ethereum can significantly increase throughput without aggressively raising the Gas limit, alleviating current performance bottlenecks.

Additionally, Glamsterdam will embed the proposer-builder separation (ePBS) mechanism directly into the protocol layer. This design helps reduce centralization risks during block construction, enhances the network’s censorship resistance, and paves the way for zero-knowledge proof-based validation methods. At this stage, the Gas limit is also expected to gradually increase; after ePBS activation, the Gas limit per block could rise to approximately 200 million.

On the Layer 2 side, the 2026 upgrade is equally significant. Ethereum plans to increase the amount of data each block can carry, providing more available data for Rollup networks. This will directly boost Layer 2 throughput, making it more suitable for high-frequency trading and complex applications. Furthermore, by improving interoperability design, asset and data flow between different Layer 2 solutions will become smoother.

The Heze-Bogota fork at the end of the year will focus more on strengthening censorship resistance. Its key mechanism is the “fork selection inclusion list,” which allows validators to collectively ensure that specific transactions are included in blocks, preventing transactions from being filtered or blocked for extended periods. As long as a portion of honest nodes remains in the network, this mechanism can safeguard Ethereum’s core principles of neutrality and permissionlessness.

Overall, Glamsterdam and Heze-Bogota will mark a significant step forward in Ethereum’s performance, scalability, and censorship resistance. While achieving 10,000 TPS may still take time, 2026 will undoubtedly be a pivotal year in Ethereum’s technological evolution, laying a solid foundation for future large-scale applications and ecosystem growth.