June 2026 is shaping up as a landmark month for Ethereum. The Glamsterdam hard fork — named after merging two proposal bundles, GLOAS and Amsterdam — targets a 3.3x jump in layer-1 throughput. That means pushing the network’s effective gas limit from 60 million today to close to 200 million after activation.
Developers, institutional participants, and DeFi builders have all been paying close attention. If Glamsterdam ships as specified, block space that currently costs hundreds of dollars during congestion could become a fraction of that price. The math behind it is more involved than a simple capacity bump.
Three Technical Threads, One Hard Fork
The capacity gains aren’t the product of a single change. Three distinct workstreams converged to make Glamsterdam possible.
Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) moves block-building mechanics into the core protocol. At present, the separation between parties who assemble transaction bundles and those who propose blocks to validators happens through MEV-Boost — middleware that sits outside the protocol. This creates fragility. Baking it directly into Ethereum makes block production more stable under adversarial conditions and trims latency in the process.
Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) are where the throughput multiplier comes from. Ethereum today processes transactions sequentially — one at a time, in order — regardless of whether those transactions touch any shared state. BALs allow the execution layer to identify non-conflicting transactions and run them in parallel, like a multi-core processor handling independent threads. Lido advisor Hasu, who published an analysis of the proposal, attributes most of the projected 3.3x improvement to this single mechanism.
EVM state efficiency improvements round things out. Storage operations get cheaper at the protocol level. Contract interactions cost less gas — without the gas limit itself needing to move.
What Happens to Gas Prices
The downstream math is straightforward: more throughput means more supply of block space. If demand doesn’t immediately absorb the new capacity, prices fall.
Hasu’s analysis concludes that during off-peak hours, average transaction costs could approach negligible levels. Cointribune’s coverage of the proposal ran with the headline “Fees Could Approach Zero,” citing the move from 60M to 200M gas capacity as the mechanism. The Defiant put the same figure in context: that 200M target represents a 3.3x jump from current limits, with BALs doing the heavy lifting.
There’s a catch worth flagging. Scaling improvements on Ethereum have a long history of attracting demand that fills the new headroom. Istanbul in 2019, EIP-1559, Dencun’s blob fee market — all of them brought temporary relief before use growth caught up. Glamsterdam will probably trace the same arc. Lower fees out of the gate, then a new equilibrium as more activity shows up.
Competitive Stakes
Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade is simultaneously in live validator testing, targeting 150ms finality and a 75% block capacity increase. Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism collectively process more transactions than Ethereum L1 on most days. The competitive pressure on Ethereum to improve its base layer has been real, and Glamsterdam represents the core development team’s response.
Ethereum developers have described Glamsterdam as a continuation of the existing roadmap, not a pivot. BALs have been on the table since at least 2022. Still, the decision to package ePBS, BALs, and state improvements together — rather than spread them across multiple hard forks — suggests the team is aware that rivals are closing ground fast.
A post-Glamsterdam Ethereum running at 200M gas capacity on L1, with a mature L2 ecosystem handling the highest-volume applications, looks quite different from the chain that drove users to cheaper alternatives between 2021 and 2024.
Timeline
Devnet testing is ongoing. The Ethereum Foundation hasn’t published an activation block number, but developer calls have consistently pointed to June 2026. Once testing is complete, the standard governance process — finalization on AllCoreDevs calls, client releases, testnet activation — determines the final timeline.
For developers, the most practical near-term implication is that contract deployments, on-chain governance votes, and large DeFi transactions on L1 should get meaningfully cheaper once Glamsterdam is live.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade?
Glamsterdam is a hard fork combining the GLOAS and Amsterdam proposal bundles. It introduces Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, Block-Level Access Lists for parallel transaction execution, and EVM state efficiency improvements — projected to triple Ethereum’s layer-1 execution capacity.
When does Glamsterdam activate?
The target window is June 2026, pending devnet testing and the standard Ethereum governance process. No exact activation block has been published.
Will gas fees actually drop?
In the short term, yes — tripling block capacity creates more supply of block space. During off-peak periods, fees could fall sharply. Over time, demand tends to absorb new capacity, but the higher throughput baseline should moderate fee spikes that currently price out many users.
