Following the successful completion of the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades in 2025, Ethereum has outlined a continued ambitious roadmap for 2026. The network plans to implement two significant hard forks, named Glamsterdam (targeted for mid-year) and Heze-Bogota (scheduled for year-end), aimed at substantially advancing its transaction processing speed (TPS), privacy, and security. The Glamsterdam upgrade is primarily designed to make the Ethereum network faster and more cost-efficient. It will focus on three key technical improvements: 1. **Parallel Transaction Processing:** Moving away from the current sequential (single-lane) transaction execution model to allow for simultaneous processing of multiple transactions, akin to adding multiple lanes to a highway to alleviate congestion and increase throughput. 2. **Gas Limit Increase:** Proposing to raise the gas limit per block from the current 60 million units to potentially 200-300 million units. This would allow each block to accommodate a significantly higher volume of transactions. 3. **ZK Proof Verification:** Integrating Zero-Knowledge proof verification to enable validators to efficiently confirm the correctness of transaction batches without re-executing every single operation, thereby saving time and computational resources. If implemented as planned in 2026, the combination of these enhancements, alongside a continued expansion of data blobs (potentially to 72 or more), could enable Ethereum Layer 1 to progress toward a target of 10,000 TPS. This would also lead to substantial performance gains for Layer 2 solutions. Collectively, these upgrades are expected to equip the Ethereum ecosystem with the necessary performance capacity to support a wide range of existing and emerging application scenarios. The subsequent Heze-Bogota hard fork will concentrate on strengthening network resilience, privacy, and decentralization. Key anticipated features include: – **Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists (FOCIL):** A mechanism designed to enhance censorship resistance by allowing multiple validators to collaboratively force the inclusion of specific transactions into blocks, ensuring transaction finality even in the presence of malicious actors. – **Enhanced Privacy Protections:** Implementing improved encryption or anonymity techniques to better shield transaction details from public scrutiny. – **Decentralization Advancements:** Introducing changes to reduce reliance on a small number of large node operators, thereby making the network more distributed and resistant to control or attack. It is important to note that these plans represent the current development outlook and are subject to change based on ongoing research, testing, and community consensus. The final implementation details may evolve as the upgrades approach their scheduled deployment dates.