Ethereum’s 2026 Overhaul: 10,000 TPS & Massive Gas Boost Incoming
Ethereum's roadmap just got a turbocharger. The network's long-awaited scalability leap is locked in for 2026, promising to shatter its current performance ceiling.
From Bottleneck to Broadband
The upgrades target the network's most persistent pain points: throughput and cost. The planned architecture shifts aim to catapult transaction capacity to a staggering 10,000 per second. That's not an incremental step—it's a paradigm shift designed to finally handle mainstream adoption without breaking a sweat.
The Gas Fee Guillotine
Parallel to the speed boost comes the other headline act: a massive reduction in gas costs. The upgrade suite is engineered to dismantle the fee market's volatility, making predictable, low-cost transactions the new normal. It cuts the economic friction that has long pushed developers and users toward cheaper, often shakier, alternatives.
Why 2026 Changes Everything
This isn't just another patch. The 2026 timeline sets the stage for Ethereum to solidify its foundation after the Merge and subsequent sharding implementations. It bypasses theoretical roadmaps and plants a flag in the near future, giving builders a clear horizon to innovate upon. The promise? A network that doesn't just host decentralized finance but can actually scale it—imagine that.
The upgrades deliver what the crypto crowd has been begging for: utility over speculation. Finally, a bullish narrative you can actually use, not just trade on. The real test won't be the price chart, but whether the user experience finally catches up to the trillion-dollar market cap.
Ethereum Introduces ePBS to Reduce Centralization
Other significant changes include Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation (ePBS). This is because Ethereum separates block builders and proposers to reduce centralization pressure created by MEV and increase time for validators to verify zero-knowledge ZK proofs.
A strategy proposed by Ethereum researcher Ladislaus von Daniels will make ZK validation more attractive, thus enabling roughly 10% of the validators on the network to use ZK validation methods next year, said Justin from the Ethereum Foundation.
These changes altogether put Ethereum LAYER 1 on a trajectory to reach an aim of processing 10,000 transactions per second in the future.
Source: Growthepie
The layer 2 networks are also set to acquire more blobs of data, with a possible total of 72 per block, allowing them to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.
Heze-Bogota Fork: Privacy and Decentralization in Focus
Coming after Glamsterdam, the Heze-Bogota fork is scheduled for late 2026. It aims at privacy provisions, resisting censorship, and promoting more decentralization.
The most discussed concept at this point is Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists (FOCIL). It allows many validators to combine their powers to verify transactions while certain sections of the network are not entirely reliable.
Gas limits may increase to 200 million after ePBS and could go up to 300 million by the end of this year, according to Tomasz Stańczak, co-director of the Ethereum Foundation.
But according to Vitalik Buterin, growth is not going to be even and is going to lead to inefficient operations and large contracts. Such upgrades and the plans to add interoperability layers to the Layer 2s are expected to improve the scalability and speed of Ethereum and its resistance against censorship.
Source: Growthepie
