A specific narrative has been circulating in the cryptocurrency space for a number of years. The narrative goes that Ethereum is too sluggish. Too costly. Its fees skyrocket at the worst times, its transactions back up during periods of high usage, and rival chains that are quicker, more efficient, and were created from the ground up to overcome Ethereum’s shortcomings are poised to overtake it.
At a fraction of a cent each, Solana handles tens of thousands of transactions every second. Avalanche was built to be fast. The underlying premise of a whole class of investment theories, commonly summed up as “Ethereum killers,” is that Ethereum’s technological flaws are structural rather than fixable. In essence, the present upgrade roadmap is a lengthy and intricate technical argument that those presumptions were incorrect.
| Ethereum Upgrade Roadmap — Key Milestones | |
| Full Danksharding (“The Surge”) | Expands blob capacity from 6 to 64 per block — provides massive data availability space for Layer 2 rollups, targeting millions of transactions per second while maintaining Layer 1 security |
|---|---|
| 2026 Glamsterdam Upgrade | Follows the 2025 Pectra and Fusaka upgrades — includes EIP-7732 (Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation for more efficient block production) and EIP-7904 (gas repricing to realign fees with modern compute costs) |
| EVM Object Format (EOF) | Major rewrite of the Ethereum Virtual Machine — separates code from data within smart contracts, enabling faster execution, easier security auditing, and a more developer-friendly environment |
| The Verge (Verkle Trees) | Replaces Merkle trees with Verkle Trees — dramatically smaller proof sizes enable “stateless clients,” allowing mobile phones and browser extensions to validate transactions without storing the full chain history |
| Target Fee Reduction | Post-2025 upgrades aim for approximately 100x reduction in Layer 2 transaction costs — narrowing or eliminating the fee advantage currently held by competing Layer 1 chains like Solana |
| Competitive & Strategic Context | |
| The Modular Advantage | Ethereum’s strategy separates execution (handled by L2s like Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync) from security (handled by L1) — combining high-performance throughput with maximum decentralization and trustless verification |
| Current Market Position | Ethereum holds the majority of Total Value Locked (TVL) across decentralized finance and the largest active developer community of any smart contract platform — the upgrade roadmap is designed to protect and expand this position |
| Competitive Threat Addressed | High-speed monolithic chains like Solana have competed primarily on transaction speed and low fees — L2Beat data shows Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem already processing more transactions daily than most competing L1s, a gap the upgrades aim to widen further |
The Pectra and Fusaka renovations from 2025 are followed by the Glamsterdam upgrade in 2026. Glamsterdam makes two major adjustments to the execution layer, which is the equipment that actually processes transactions. Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, or EIP-7732, modifies block construction and validation in ways that increase process efficiency and reduce manipulation. In an effort to further lower user charges for on-chain activities,
EIP-7904 reprices gas fees to more accurately represent contemporary computing expenses. When paired with the EVM Object Format, a significant overhaul of the Ethereum Virtual Machine that separates code from data to facilitate quicker contract execution and more transparent auditing, Glamsterdam brings the execution layer significantly closer to the performance attributes that users of rival chains have been pointing to as reasons to switch.
Danksharding is a more significant architectural modification that is a component of what Ethereum’s roadmap refers to as “The Surge.” This project’s most technically ambitious component tackles the scalability issue at the data layer as opposed to the execution layer. Six data “blobs” can be connected to each block in the current implementation, Proto-Danksharding, which was first implemented in early 2024.
Layer 2 rollups use this inexpensive storage space to submit compressed transaction data back to Ethereum’s mainnet for security verification. This increases to 64 blobs per block with full Danksharding, resulting in a tenfold boost in data availability that spreads throughout the Layer 2 ecosystem. Assuming the upgrade goes according to plan, the practical outcome is a network with an aggregate throughput of millions of transactions per second that can support hundreds of separate rollups at once, each operating at a high speed and inheriting Ethereum’s Layer 1 security.
This is at the heart of the Ethereum roadmap’s strategic significance, which is sometimes obscured by individual updates. For many years, the competition among smart contract platforms has been portrayed as a trade-off between speed and cost and security and decentralization. Chains such as Solana prioritize throughput above censorship resistance and operate on very concentrated validator sets,
making architectural decisions that sacrifice some of the former in order to optimize extensively for the latter. The Layer 2 ecosystem and the modifications that support it are Ethereum’s way of saying that the tradeoff is a bad decision. Let security be handled by the base layer. Let speed be handled by the execution layers. Additionally, make use of technological advancements to bring the cost of connecting them closer to zero.
The Verge offers a third perspective on Ethereum’s vision that isn’t given enough attention in the media. Ethereum is moving toward a state of “statelessness” in which full nodes do not need to retain the complete chain history in order to validate new transactions by substituting Verkle Trees, a more compact data structure that generates significantly smaller cryptographic proofs, for Merkle trees.
The practical effect is that in the future, a mobile device or browser extension may be used to operate a validator or even validate Ethereum transactions. This change has important decentralization implications: a network with a larger, more dispersed validator set is one where membership requires less hardware, and a more dispersed validator set is one that is more resistant to censorship.
Instead of acknowledging that increasing one thing necessitates diminishing another, Ethereum is attempting to simultaneously progress along all pertinent dimensions.
The timeline’s validity is still up for debate. There have been delays in Ethereum’s upgrading history, and Full Danksharding in particular is a complicated enough project that completion expectations have changed in the past. Given the stakes, the development community working on these enhancements is sizable, dispersed, and uses a consensus approach that is purposefully conservative.
However, the roadmap’s overall direction makes it difficult to ignore the fact that Ethereum’s rivals are steadily closing the gap around which they established their market positions. The truly open question is whether it closes quickly enough to have an impact on competition in the near future. Compared to earlier times, the technical direction is much less unclear.
