Analysis: 2026 Will Be Ethereum's Key Scalability Moment, Gas Limit to Increase Significantly from 60 Million to 200 Million

December 25th, per Cointelegraph, next year will be a critical period for Ethereum’s scalability. By 2026, Ethereum will undergo the Glamsterdam fork, which will bring near-perfect parallel processing to its mainnet and boost the gas limit significantly—from the current 60 million to 200 million. A large number of validators will shift from re-executing transactions to verifying zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. This shift will put Ethereum Layer 1 on a path to scale to 10,000+ transactions per second (TPS), though the goal won’t be hit by 2026. Meanwhile, data blocks will grow (each block could reach 72 or more), enabling Layer 2s to process hundreds of thousands of TPS. Layer 2s are also becoming more user-friendly: ZKsync’s recent Atlas upgrade lets users keep funds on the mainnet while transacting in the ZKsync rollup’s fast execution environment. A planned Ethereum interoperability layer will facilitate seamless cross-chain operations between Layer 2s, with a focus on privacy. The Heze-Bogota fork, meanwhile, aims to enhance censorship resistance by year-end.