#Gate广场四月发帖挑战

ETH 2026 Three Core Highlights of the Technical Upgrade (Glamsterdam + Hegotá)

In 2026, Ethereum’s technical upgrade focuses on three core areas: “performance scaling, MEV governance, and lightweight state.” The first half’s Glamsterdam and the second half’s Hegotá are closely connected, and the key highlights are as follows:

✨ First half: Glamsterdam (H1 2026) — Double Breakthroughs in Performance and Governance

- Transaction parallelization + block capacity leap
The core is block-level access lists (BALs), changing transactions from “single-lane serial” to “multi-lane parallel,” so that nodes can prefetch dependency relationships and execute in parallel across multiple cores; combined with the gas cap increasing from 60 million to 200 million, theoretical TPS approaches the ten-thousand range, directly lowering Layer2 fees, and paving the way for high-frequency interactions in RWA and DeFi.
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- Native protocol MEV governance (ePBS)
Embed the proposer-builder separation (ePBS) into the protocol to replace external relays: the Builder packages transactions (encrypted content), and the Proposer only selects the block with the highest bid; this reduces centralization risks as well as front-running and sandwich attacks, while reserving ZK proof time windows for validators to achieve “fair + efficient.”
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- Gas and state repricing
Price based on actual CPU, storage, and bandwidth consumption to suppress malicious resource occupation and improve cost predictability; clear obstacles for large-scale data to be put on-chain (such as NFT metadata and RWA assets).

🌱 Second half: Hegotá (H2 2026) — Lightweight and Sustainable Upgrades

- Verkle tree replaces Merkle tree
The core is the Verkle tree. Using polynomial commitments, it compresses witness size from 10KB+ to within 1KB, improves verification speed, and significantly lowers the node storage threshold; it supports the deployment of stateless clients, enabling more people to run nodes and strengthening decentralization.
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- State expiry mechanism (State Expiry)
Archive/cut off stale state data and state data that has not been accessed frequently, curb state bloat, reduce hardware and bandwidth costs for full nodes, and make Ethereum’s long-term operation more sustainable.
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- Carrying forward unfinished features
Complete the protocol optimizations that were not finished in Glamsterdam, maintain a semiannual upgrade cadence, and lay the groundwork for future upgrades such as Danksharding and single-slot finality.

🎯 Core Value and Impact of the Upgrade

- User side: Layer2 fees significantly decrease, transactions are confirmed faster, and costs become more controllable ;
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- Developer side: state management becomes lighter, deployment flexibility increases, and it helps build complex applications;
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- Ecosystem side: provides a performance and compliance foundation for institutional-grade applications (such as RWA and high-frequency DeFi), and helps unlock the practical value of ETH.