Everything You Need to Know About Ethereum’s Next Big Upgrade

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, recently elaborated on X what to know about the blockchain’s roadmap and what to expect.

Glamsterdam: Making Ethereum Faster Without New Hardware

The Glamsterdam upgrade centers on one core idea: doing more with what already exists.

Right now, Ethereum nodes process blocks one step at a time — sequentially. The upgrade introduces something called Block-level Access Lists, which allows nodes to handle multiple parts of a block at the same time, in parallel. The practical result is faster block verification across the entire network.

Alongside this, a change called Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) allows the network to use nearly the full time available in each slot for verifying blocks — compared to just milliseconds today. More time for verification means more room for the network to grow without compromising stability.

On the cost side, the roadmap proposes adjusting gas fees to better reflect what operations actually cost the network. Creating new storage, for example, would become more expensive — but raw execution capacity would scale independently, keeping the network competitive.

2. A Smarter Way to Handle Network Resources

Today, Ethereum’s virtual machine treats every operation as if it consumes just one type of resource. That’s an oversimplification — and it creates real limits.

The proposed solution is a “Reservoir” system that separates resources into multiple dimensions. Specialized operations (like creating new on-chain storage) draw from their own dedicated resource pool first. When that pool runs dry, the system dips into a shared general reserve.

This design solves a long-standing ceiling: contracts larger than the current 16 million gas cap become possible without breaking existing applications. Over time, each resource dimension would have its own dynamic pricing — similar to how EIP-1559 works today — allowing different parts of the network to scale at their own pace.

3. ZK-Proofs: Ethereum’s Long Game

The most forward-looking part of the roadmap outlines a multi-year transition toward a chain where every block is verified using ZK-SNARKs — cryptographic proofs that confirm something is true without requiring full re-execution.

The timeline breaks down roughly as follows:

By 2026, a small share of the network (around 5%) is expected to begin running ZK-EVM clients in a testing capacity — not yet considered fully safe for the whole network, but enough to gather real data without putting validators at risk.

By 2027, once roughly 20% of validators are running ZK-EVMs, the gas limit could be raised significantly. Solo stakers — who make up less than 20% of the network — would gain access to a lightweight verification path, meaning scaling no longer requires expensive hardware.

The end state envisions a “3-of-5 multi-proof” model, where a block needs valid proofs from three out of five distinct proof systems before it’s accepted. This prevents a single bug in one prover from being able to compromise the entire chain.

4. Data Availability: Ethereum Becoming Its Own Archive

The PeerDAS upgrade targets roughly 8 MB per second in data availability capacity — a major step up from current levels.
More notably, Ethereum’s own block data is expected to eventually migrate into blobs. This means users would be able to verify the full chain using ZK-SNARKs for execution and PeerDAS for data — without ever needing to download the complete history. Light verification becomes the default, not the exception.

The Bigger Picture

Across all four areas, a consistent theme emerges: Ethereum is engineering a future where scaling doesn’t come at the cost of decentralization. Solo staking remains viable. ZK-proofs handle the heavy computational lifting. And the architecture is being redesigned from the ground up to support resources — compute, storage, data — scaling independently of one another.

The shift toward RISC-V and other more efficient virtual machine architectures is also on the horizon, once the ZK-EVM foundation is in place.
This is a long-term build — but the milestones are concrete, the timeline is public, and the pieces are starting to move.

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