Ethereum’s Upcoming Upgrades: From Pectra to Glamsterdam and Hegota

After Pectra: Where Ethereum Stands in Early 2026

The most recent major milestone on Ethereum’s roadmap was the Prague–Electra hard fork, better known as Pectra, which activated on mainnet on May 7, 2025 at epoch 364032. Pectra combined execution‑layer and consensus‑layer changes, including higher validator effective balances (EIP‑7251), on‑chain deposit tracking (EIP‑6110), execution‑triggered exits (EIP‑7002), a BLS12‑381 precompile (EIP‑2537), and a significant increase in data “blob” throughput for rollups (EIP‑7691, EIP‑7840). Coindataflow

Just as important, Pectra laid the groundwork for smarter wallets via account abstraction, with EIP‑7702 allowing externally owned accounts (EOAs) to temporarily behave like smart contracts, enabling features like gas sponsorship, batched actions and passkey‑based logins. Ethereum researchers have described Pectra as the last “big, disruptive” upgrade before the network moves into a more incremental phase, where scaling and UX are refined rather than reinvented. That phase is now arriving in 2026 through two coordinated hard forks: Glamsterdam and Hegota.

A New Cadence: Twice‑Yearly Hard Forks

One of the quiet but significant changes after Pectra has been Ethereum’s move to a biannual release cadence. Instead of shipping one huge upgrade roughly once a year, core developers have agreed to target two narrower hard forks per year, reducing coordination risk and allowing features to ship faster. For 2026, that means Glamsterdam in the first half and Hegota in the second half, with scope adjusted as client teams hit or miss testing milestones.

Official “protocol priorities” documents and ecosystem summaries break 2026 work into three tracks: scaling, user experience and “hardening the L1.” Glamsterdam leans heavily into the scale and L1‑hardening buckets by improving how blocks are built and executed, while Hegota focuses on deep state‑management issues like node storage and stateless clients.

Glamsterdam (H1 2026): Speeding Up the Engine

Enshrined Proposer–Builder Separation (ePBS)

The headline feature for Glamsterdam is enshrined proposer–builder separation (ePBS), which pulls today’s off‑chain MEV‑Boost‑style marketplace into the protocol itself. Instead of validators relying on external relays and custom software to outsource block construction, Glamsterdam would define a native separation between builders (who assemble the most profitable block) and proposers (who sign and publish it).

Advocates argue this makes MEV markets more transparent and trust‑minimized, reduces censorship pressure on individual validators, and cuts the risk of a few private relays gaining undue control over transaction ordering. For users and DeFi protocols, a successful ePBS rollout should mean more predictable inclusion, fewer opaque reorgs, and a lower chance of arbitrary blacklisting at the relay layer.

Block‑Level Access Lists and Parallel Execution

Another key Glamsterdam track is performance: specifically, reducing execution bottlenecks so clients can safely run more transactions in parallel. Block‑Level Access Lists (BALs) are being explored as a way to pre‑declare which accounts and storage slots each transaction will touch, letting nodes avoid repeated disk reads and enabling non‑conflicting transactions to execute concurrently. [mexc]

Engineering write‑ups from client teams describe BALs as the scaffolding needed to exploit multi‑core CPUs more fully, squeezing extra throughput out of existing hardware before simply raising gas limits. Some researchers have floated a phased gas‑limit increase toward 100 million in H1 2026, with the option to go higher (up to roughly 200 million) if ePBS and execution optimizations prove stable in production. Combined with Pectra’s blob‑throughput bump, this pushes Ethereum closer to the 10,000‑TPS range core teams have flagged as a medium‑term target when counting rollups.

Cheaper, More Scalable Rollups

While Glamsterdam is an L1 upgrade, its biggest impact will likely be on L2s. Pectra already expanded blob capacity and refined scheduling, cutting data costs for rollups that publish compressed transaction batches on‑chain. Glamsterdam continues that trajectory by exploring higher blob throughput (up to 72 blobs per block in some scenarios) and making it easier for nodes to handle that extra data without choking.

AInvest’s DeFi roadmap analysis suggests that, taken together, Pectra plus Glamsterdam could reduce typical rollup fees by another 30–50% versus 2024 levels, enabling more on‑chain orderflow, RWAs and consumer apps to stay within users’ fee tolerance. For end users, that shows up as “L2 feels cheaper and more responsive,” even though most of the heavy lifting happens under the hood at L1.

Hegota (H2 2026): Fixing State Bloat with Verkle Trees

State Growth: Ethereum’s Long‑Term Pain Point

If Glamsterdam tunes Ethereum’s engine, Hegota is a chassis rebuild. As of early 2026, Ethereum’s state—its full set of accounts, contracts and storage slots—runs into the hundreds of gigabytes, making it expensive and slow to run a full node. The network currently relies on Merkle Patricia Tries, which produce large proofs and require nodes to store extensive data just to verify small pieces of state.

Hegota’s centerpiece is Verkle Trees, a newer commitment scheme that dramatically shrinks proof sizes and lays the foundation for “stateless” or near‑stateless clients. By allowing nodes to verify state with compact witnesses instead of full history, Verkle Trees attack the state‑bloat problem directly—crucial for keeping Ethereum decentralized as usage grows.

Verkle Trees and Stateless Clients

Research from Ethereum core teams and independent analysts suggests that a mature Verkle transition could reduce node storage requirements by up to an order of magnitude, from hundreds of gigabytes to on the order of a few gigabytes for many setups. New nodes would be able to sync in minutes rather than days, and light clients could verify blocks using small witnesses supplied alongside headers.

AInvest’s February 2026 note frames Verkle Trees as one of the key prerequisites for long‑term institutional adoption, since they cut hardware and maintenance costs for banks, custodians and enterprises that want to run their own infrastructure. For the broader community, they lower the barrier to running a full node at home, helping counter the centralizing pull of large cloud deployments.

Censorship Resistance and FOCIL

Alongside state changes, Hegota is expected to pick up proposals related to censorship resistance, including fork‑choice inclusion lists (FOCIL), which make it easier for honest validators to ensure that censored transactions eventually get included. When combined with ePBS from Glamsterdam, these mechanisms aim to harden Ethereum against both explicit blacklisting and more subtle forms of transaction filtering.

Analysts emphasize that this matters not only philosophically but commercially: as RWAs, stablecoins and ETFs drive more regulated capital on‑chain, Ethereum needs strong, protocol‑level guarantees that no single government, relay operator or builder can quietly control who gets to transact.

Continuing UX and Account Abstraction Work

Beyond raw performance and state, upcoming upgrades build on Pectra’s account‑abstraction push. EIP‑7702, introduced with Pectra, lets EOAs temporarily “become” smart accounts, enabling gas sponsorship, social recovery, batched actions and web2‑style authentication flows. Wallet and L2 teams are now integrating these capabilities so users can enjoy features like paying gas in stablecoins or logging in with hardware‑backed passkeys instead of seed phrases.

Some of this work will land at L2s and app layers rather than as headline EIPs in Glamsterdam or Hegota, but protocol‑level hooks and clarifications are on the table, particularly around standardizing “smart account” behaviors and fee abstraction. The end goal is that, by the time the 2026 cycle is complete, Ethereum feels far less like a developer tool and more like a mainstream financial and application platform.

What It All Means for DeFi and Institutional Adoption

Put together, the upcoming upgrades form a coherent story: Pectra cleaned up staking and boosted L2 data capacity; Glamsterdam focuses on execution efficiency, MEV fairness and higher throughput; Hegota re‑architects state storage for the long haul. AInvest estimates that, if targets are met, Ethereum could support an effective 10,000+ TPS across L2s with fees down roughly 50% from 2024 averages, even as RWAs and DeFi TVL grow.

For DeFi, that capacity enables more sophisticated derivatives, on‑chain order books and real‑time risk engines without pricing out smaller users. For institutions, Verkle Trees and biannual, well‑documented hard forks send a signal of technical maturity and predictable governance, which are prerequisites for long‑term commitments of balance‑sheet capital.

Of course, there are execution risks: timelines can slip, client bugs can surface, and the complexity of Verkle migration in particular has many engineers urging caution. But for now, Ethereum’s upcoming upgrades in 2026 outline a clear direction—toward faster, cheaper, more decentralized infrastructure designed not just to keep up with the last cycle, but to anchor the next one.