Ethereum Developers Leave the Arctic With a Gas Limit Target, a New Leadership Structure, and Two Upgrades Taking Shape
Over 100 core contributors gathered above the Arctic Circle last week to advance the Glamsterdam hard fork and lay groundwork for the upgrade that follows it.
They left Svalbard with a confirmed 200 million gas limit floor, a stabilized proposer-builder separation implementation, and three new protocol cluster leads stepping into roles vacated by departing Ethereum Foundation staff.
The gathering, formally called Soldøgn (the Norwegian word for the midnight sun), took place in Longyearbyen, Norway, at 78 degrees north latitude, roughly one week in late April through early May 2026. It targeted two things: locking down the remaining open questions in Glamsterdam and scoping the upgrade after it, currently called Hegotá. Glamsterdam is widely described as Ethereum's most technically ambitious upgrade since The Merge.
What Glamsterdam Is Meant to Do
Glamsterdam is Ethereum's next scheduled hard fork, targeting H1 2026, with developer commentary acknowledging a realistic possibility of slipping to Q3 or Q4. The name is a portmanteau of Glasgow and Amsterdam, the cities that hosted recent EthCC conferences.
Its central promise is a roughly threefold increase in execution capacity, pushing toward a gas limit of 200 million, up from the current 60 million cap introduced by last December's Fusaka upgrade, and aiming for roughly 10,000 transactions per second compared to roughly 1,000 today. For context, the gas limit was 30 million before Fusaka; the roadmap now envisions 400 million and beyond after Glamsterdam clears.
Two proposals anchor the upgrade. EIP-7732, known as enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), brings block construction formally into the protocol. Today, a separate off-chain relay network handles that process, creating trust dependencies and potential censorship points. Under ePBS, the beacon block proposer commits to a builder's bid in-protocol, and the builder then reveals the block payload.
A practical side effect is that the window for propagating block data expands from roughly two seconds to roughly nine seconds, which allows more data to travel per slot and directly supports higher blob counts for layer-2 networks. Blobs are the data packets that rollups, the scaling layer sitting above Ethereum, use to post transaction records back to the base chain.
The second headliner is EIP-7928, Block-Level Access Lists (BALs). Transactions must pre-declare which storage slots they plan to read or write. That pre-declaration allows non-conflicting transactions to execute in parallel rather than sequentially, and it lets state computations run concurrently. This is the primary technical lever behind the 200 million gas target. A companion proposal, EIP-7904, works in tandem with EIP-7928; together, the two are projected to reduce fee estimates for standard ETH transfers and smart contract interactions by roughly 78.6 percent. EIP-8037, a fixed cost-per-state-byte repricing model finalized at Svalbard, is designed separately to keep state database growth at around 100 GiB per year, addressing long-term state bloat.
A third confirmed Glamsterdam EIP, EIP-8061, increases the exit and consolidation churn limit to approximately 4.6 times the current level, giving validators meaningfully faster access to their staked ETH when they choose to exit.
Tim Beiko, who is leaving the Ethereum Foundation, described the productivity at Svalbard in terms that captured the format's purpose: "At their best, interop weeks can compress a month of asynchronous progress into each day."
Leadership Shuffle
The Soldøgn gathering came alongside a significant Ethereum Foundation announcement regarding its protocol team leadership.
Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko are both departing the EF; Alex Stokes is taking a three-month sabbatical. Three new leads are stepping up: Will Corcoran, taking over as Research Coordinator with a focus on zkVM, post-quantum work, and the Fast Confirmation Rule; Kev Wedderburn, heading the zkEVM team; and Fredrik, leading Protocol Security including the Trillion Dollar Security project. Interim coordination of the two main developer calls passes to Pari and Barnabas while the transition settles.
What This Means Outside the United States
The stakes of this upgrade are particularly concrete in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, two regions that collectively account for some of the highest crypto adoption rates in the world. India ranks first on the 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index. Nigeria ranks second globally and first specifically in DeFi protocol value. Pakistan added 5.4 million new crypto users in the past year.
In these markets, mainnet Ethereum fees of $5 to $20 per interaction are not a minor inconvenience. For users in India and Pakistan, where average monthly incomes run $200 to $500, those costs routinely make direct Ethereum use economically irrational. The projected fee reductions post-Glamsterdam change that calculus. Benjamin Thalman, a staff protocol analyst at Figment, noted that "Glamsterdam materially improves exit liquidity for validators following the Pectra upgrade," a point with direct relevance to institutional stakers who have navigated slow exit churn limits since that upgrade. EIP-8061's increase to the churn limit is the specific mechanism behind that improvement.
Nigeria's position as a DeFi leader is also relevant here. Stablecoin DEX activity and yield farming, the activity types that drive Nigeria's rankings, are highly gas-elastic: participation drops sharply as fees rise. A higher gas floor before fees spike gives those users more room to operate before the network becomes expensive again.
The Hegotá upgrade, slated for the second half of 2026, adds another dimension. Its censorship-resistance feature, FOCIL (EIP-7805), requires suppressing a randomly rotated committee of 16 validators per slot simultaneously to block any single transaction. For users in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia operating in environments shaped by evolving regulatory frameworks (Nigeria's central bank lifted its crypto exchange restrictions in 2024, while Ethiopia's National Bank continues to monitor digital asset flows), that kind of structural guarantee at the protocol level carries practical weight beyond the theoretical. The Nigeria-India-Kenya stablecoin remittance corridor is among the most active on-chain globally, making censorship-resistance a concrete operational concern rather than an abstract one for participants in those markets.
Also notable for the regional picture: the LambdaClass team, based in Argentina, brought their ethrex client to Soldøgn for their first Ethereum interop. It is a signal that core client development is drawing participation from well beyond the traditional hubs in North America and Western Europe.
What Comes Next
Glamsterdam still has open design questions in the ePBS spec, including request signature commitment and resilience against Sybil attacks targeting 1-ETH staked builders.
The network's current metrics show ETH trading around $2,350, up 14 percent over the past 30 days but still roughly 50 percent below its August 2025 peak. DeFi TVL on Ethereum L1 sits near $45.7 billion, representing about 68 percent of global DeFi value. With those numbers as the baseline, the pressure on developers to ship a functioning Glamsterdam upgrade within the H1 2026 window is substantial, even as a Q3 or Q4 outcome remains a live possibility acknowledged by developers themselves.
Teams at Svalbard also began scoping Hegotá in earnest. Native Account Abstraction requirements were advanced, QUIC-based peer-to-peer networking improvements were sketched out, and erasure-coded broadcast testing showed propagation speeds roughly six times faster than the current baseline. The next upgrade is already taking shape before the current one has shipped.