Glamsterdam Is Not Just Another Upgrade — It Is a Philosophical Shift
I have followed every major Ethereum upgrade since the Beacon Chain launch in December 2020. The Merge was historic. Shapella unlocked staking withdrawals. Dencun slashed L2 costs with blobs. Each was important, but Glamsterdam feels qualitatively different. The eight EIPs that Vitalik Buterin outlined for this hard fork are not incremental improvements — they represent a fundamental rethinking of how Ethereum’s execution layer should work. If even half of them ship as proposed, the DeFi landscape in late 2026 will look dramatically different from what we see today.
I spent last weekend reading through the full EIP specifications, the associated research papers, and the developer discussion threads on Ethereum Magicians. What follows is my analysis of each proposal and why I believe this upgrade cycle could be the most consequential for ETH price action since the Merge itself.
EIP #1: Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation — Ending the MEV Oligarchy
This is the big one. For years, Maximum Extractable Value has been Ethereum’s open wound. Searchers, builders, and validators have extracted billions of dollars from ordinary users through sandwich attacks, frontrunning, and other MEV strategies. The current PBS system is voluntary — validators can choose to outsource block building to specialized builders through MEV-Boost, but nothing in the protocol requires it. This has created a concentrated ecosystem where three or four builders produce the vast majority of blocks, raising censorship and centralization concerns.
Enshrined PBS moves the proposer-builder separation from a sidecar software solution into the core protocol itself. Every validator would participate in a standardized auction process where builders submit block bids and proposers are protocol-obligated to select the highest valid bid. The key innovation is that builders would commit to block contents before the proposer selects them, preventing last-moment manipulation.
From my perspective as a DeFi user, this matters enormously. I have personally lost an estimated $2,300 to sandwich attacks over the past 18 months — that I know of. The actual figure is probably higher because some MEV extraction is subtle enough that you never notice it. Enshrined PBS would not eliminate MEV entirely, but it would make the extraction process transparent, competitive, and subject to protocol-level rules. That should reduce the average cost of MEV per transaction by an estimated 40-60%, according to Flashbots’ own modeling.
EIP #2: Block Access Lists — Unlocking Parallel Execution
This is the EIP that excites me most from a technical standpoint. Currently, the Ethereum Virtual Machine processes transactions sequentially within each block. Transaction 1 completes, then transaction 2 begins, and so on. This sequential processing is necessary because any transaction might modify the same state that a subsequent transaction reads. Without knowing which state slots each transaction will access, the EVM cannot safely parallelize execution.
Block Access Lists solve this by requiring transactions to declare upfront which storage slots and accounts they will read from and write to. With this information available at the block level, the execution engine can identify transactions that touch completely independent state and process them simultaneously. Think of it like highway lanes: instead of all traffic sharing a single lane, transactions that do not conflict with each other can run in separate lanes at the same time.
The performance implications are substantial. Paradigm’s preliminary benchmarks suggest that parallel execution could improve block processing throughput by 3-5x on typical mainnet blocks. For DeFi-heavy blocks with lots of independent swap transactions, the improvement could be even larger. This does not directly increase the gas limit, but it means nodes can validate blocks much faster, which creates headroom for future gas limit increases without compromising decentralization.
I have been running a modified Reth client that simulates access list-based parallelism on historical blocks. My results are consistent with Paradigm’s estimates: average block processing time dropped from 1.2 seconds to about 0.35 seconds for blocks in the 20-25 million gas range. That is a 70% reduction in validation time, which fundamentally changes the calculus around how much computation each block can safely contain.
EIP #3-4: Gas Limit Roadmap — From 60M to 200M
The current gas limit sits around 36 million, recently increased from 30 million through validator coordination. Vitalik’s Glamsterdam proposal envisions a phased increase: first to 60 million at the hard fork, with a protocol-managed ramp toward 200 million over the following 12-18 months. This is aggressive. The last time the gas limit doubled, it took over a year of community debate and cautious validator signaling.
But the context is different now. With Block Access Lists enabling parallel execution (EIP #2), and with client diversity improving dramatically — Geth, Reth, Nethermind, and Besu all capable of handling higher throughput — the technical constraints that previously limited gas increases are loosening. The bottleneck is shifting from computational capacity to state growth management, which is addressed by a separate EIP in the Glamsterdam set focused on state expiry.
A 200M gas limit would make Ethereum mainnet roughly 6-7x more capable than it is today. For DeFi protocols, this means lower gas costs per transaction even without L2s, more complex smart contract interactions becoming economically viable, and a potential renaissance of mainnet-native applications that had been forced to L2s purely for cost reasons. I estimate that average gas prices could drop to 3-5 gwei for standard swaps if the 200M target is reached, down from the current 15-25 gwei range.
EIP #5-6: Account Abstraction and Wallet UX Revolution
Two of the Glamsterdam EIPs focus on advancing account abstraction — the long-promised improvement that would let smart contract wallets become first-class citizens on Ethereum. ERC-4337 brought account abstraction to the application layer, but it relies on a parallel mempool and bundler infrastructure that adds complexity and cost. The Glamsterdam proposals would enshrine core AA functionality into the protocol itself.
The practical impact for users: gas sponsorship (where a dApp pays your transaction fees), session keys (approving a series of transactions without signing each one), and social recovery (recovering your wallet through trusted contacts rather than seed phrases) would all become native protocol features rather than application-layer hacks. This matters because UX is the single biggest barrier to mainstream crypto adoption. Nobody outside of crypto enthusiasts thinks that managing seed phrases and paying gas fees in ETH is an acceptable user experience.
From an investment perspective, native AA could accelerate Ethereum’s user growth significantly. Estimates from the Ethereum Foundation’s UX research team suggest that eliminating the “gas fee confusion” barrier alone could increase new wallet creation rates by 30-40%. More users means more transaction volume, which means more ETH burned through EIP-1559, which creates a tighter supply dynamic. The second-order effects compound in ETH’s favor.
EIP #7-8: State Expiry and Historical Data Pruning
The final two EIPs address Ethereum’s growing state bloat problem. The full Ethereum state — all account balances, contract storage, and code — now exceeds 200 GB and grows by roughly 30 GB per year. Nodes must maintain this entire state to validate new blocks, which creates hardware requirements that slowly squeeze out smaller operators and concentrate validation among well-resourced entities.
State expiry would introduce a mechanism where state that has not been accessed for a defined period (currently proposed at 2 years) gets moved to a “cold” tier. It would still be accessible but would require a proof-of-existence to resurrect, imposing a small cost on accessing stale data rather than forcing all nodes to keep it immediately available forever. Historical data pruning complements this by allowing nodes to safely discard block bodies and receipts older than a certain threshold, relying on distributed archival networks to maintain historical availability.
These might sound like boring infrastructure changes, but they are critical for Ethereum’s long-term viability as a decentralized network. Without state management, the hardware requirements for running a full node would eventually become prohibitive for individuals, turning Ethereum into a de facto permissioned network run by cloud providers. That would undermine everything the project is built on.
My Outlook: Glamsterdam as an ETH Price Catalyst and L2 Ecosystem Reshaper
Let me be direct about how I think this plays out for ETH price. The Merge was a “sell the news” event — ETH rallied into it and sold off afterward. I expect Glamsterdam to follow the opposite pattern. The upgrade is currently receiving minimal mainstream attention because its proposals are technically dense and hard to summarize in a tweet. Retail awareness is low. That means the market has not yet priced in the magnitude of these changes.
Here is my thesis: Glamsterdam makes Ethereum mainnet competitive with L2s on cost for many use cases, while simultaneously making it a better settlement layer for the L2s that remain necessary for the highest-throughput applications. A 200M gas limit with 3-5 gwei fees means that a standard DEX swap on mainnet would cost roughly $0.50-$1.00, compared to $0.05-$0.20 on current L2s. The gap narrows substantially, and many users may choose the security and composability of mainnet over the marginal cost savings of L2s.
For L2 ecosystems, this is a double-edged situation. On one hand, cheaper mainnet transactions could cannibalize some L2 volume. On the other hand, the parallel execution and higher gas limits make Ethereum a vastly better data availability and settlement layer, which benefits L2s that use it for security. I expect a consolidation wave: the strongest L2s (Arbitrum, Base, Optimism) will thrive, while smaller L2s without differentiated use cases will struggle to justify their existence.
My ETH position is currently 25% of my total crypto portfolio, and I plan to increase it to 35% over the next six weeks as the Glamsterdam timeline solidifies. If the developer calls in March and April confirm an on-schedule deployment for Q3 2026, I expect ETH to outperform BTC by 15-25% in the three months leading up to the fork. The risk? Developer delays. Every Ethereum upgrade in history has shipped late. If Glamsterdam slips to Q4 or beyond, the narrative momentum dissipates and the trade thesis weakens. I am managing that risk by scaling into the position gradually rather than making one large bet.