What’s Next on Ethereum’s Upgrade Path in 2026

Ethereum has shipped a steady stream of upgrades since the switch to proof-of-stake in 2022. If you’ve been trying to keep track, the confusing part is that there was never a single “Ethereum 2.0 moment” that wrapped everything up.

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The network evolves through coordinated protocol changes—hard forks—that introduce new features, adjust economics, and change how the protocol behaves under load.

Since the Merge in September 2022, the focus has narrowed around a few repeating priorities: scaling (especially for layer-2s), lowering transaction costs, improving wallets, and making it easier to run nodes and validators without needing enterprise-grade hardware. Developers have also talked about aiming for roughly two major upgrades per year—when research and testing are ready—rather than forcing an artificial timeline.

This guide connects the dots: what changed in the last few hard forks, how it fits into the broader roadmap, and what the next upgrades—Glamsterdam and Hegota—are expected to target in 2026 (with the usual caveat that scope and timing can shift during development).

How Ethereum Actually Upgrades

Ethereum upgrades by coordinating changes across client software. When a hard fork activates, node operators and validators must update to remain compatible with the network’s new rules. That’s why upgrades feel like “events”: the protocol’s behavior changes at a specific block height or epoch, and the ecosystem moves forward together.

That process is a big reason Ethereum remains under active development. The network isn’t a static product. It’s a living protocol with a research pipeline, testing phases (devnets and testnets), and a release cadence that depends on what’s ready—not what’s convenient.

Ethereum’s Rollup-First Scaling Strategy

Ethereum’s scaling plan leans heavily on layer-2 networks. These are separate chains built on top of Ethereum that handle transactions off-chain (or off the base layer) and then post results back to Ethereum for security and settlement.

Most major L2 designs use rollups. Rollups bundle many transactions together and publish compressed data to Ethereum as a batch. Instead of the base chain processing every single user action, Ethereum verifies rollup data and finalizes outcomes. The practical effect is that more users can transact at lower cost, while Ethereum remains the core settlement layer.

This is why so much of Ethereum development now targets rollup usability. If it becomes cheaper and easier for rollups to publish data, you typically see better L2 costs and smoother user experiences. When it becomes expensive, rollup users feel it immediately.

For everyday users, the roadmap can feel abstract—until you compare the fee experience before and after major upgrades. Changes that improve data availability and reduce the cost of publishing rollup batches can materially reduce fees on popular L2 networks, even if base-layer costs still spike during congestion.

The Six Roadmap “Phases” and What They Mean

In July 2022, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described the roadmap in six broad phases: the Merge, the Surge, the Scourge, the Verge, the Purge, and the Splurge. These aren’t single upgrades. They’re categories of goals, and several can progress at the same time.

• The Merge (completed): Ethereum transitioned from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, cutting energy use by roughly 99.95%.
• The Surge (ongoing): Scaling-focused work, largely centered on rollups and data availability so L2s can process more transactions cheaply.
• The Scourge (ongoing): Reducing the influence of intermediaries in block production and addressing MEV dynamics.
• The Verge (ongoing): Moving toward Verkle Trees and related improvements to reduce the resources needed to verify Ethereum state.
• The Purge (ongoing): Pruning old data and simplifying parts of the protocol so it’s easier to maintain and run.
• The Splurge: A bundle of smaller, ongoing upgrades that improve usability, efficiency, and long-term performance.

Think of these phases as a roadmap vocabulary. When someone says “this proposal helps the Verge,” they’re usually talking about reducing node burden or improving verification efficiency. When they say “this is Surge work,” they’re usually talking about scaling throughput—often via L2 enablement.

Timeline: Major Ethereum Upgrades Since 2022

Ethereum’s roadmap gets implemented through hard forks. Here’s how the recent ones fit together, in plain terms.

September 2022 — The Merge

The Merge moved Ethereum from mining to staking. Validators now lock up ETH to secure the network and propose/attest to blocks. This changed Ethereum’s security mechanism and energy profile, but it did not directly reduce fees or make transactions faster on its own.

This moment also reshaped how people compare Ethereum to Bitcoin, which still uses proof-of-work. Ethereum’s shift wasn’t just an “energy story”—it was a design change that made future scaling work (especially around rollups and data availability) easier to pursue without maintaining PoW constraints.

April 2023 — Shanghai / Shapella

Shapella enabled validator withdrawals. Before that, early stakers had ETH locked for years with no way to withdraw. The upgrade introduced partial withdrawals and full exits, which made staking feel less like a one-way door and more like a usable system.

From a market perspective, the key point wasn’t “mass selling.” It was that staking became operationally safer and more predictable for a broader set of participants.

March 2024 — Dencun

Dencun introduced proto-danksharding (EIP-4844), adding temporary “blob” storage for rollup data. This created cheaper space for L2 data so it didn’t have to compete directly with normal transactions for block space.

For many rollups, that translated into meaningful cost reductions and helped cement Ethereum’s rollup-first direction: the base layer focuses on settlement and data availability, while execution increasingly happens on L2s.

May 2025 — Pectra

Pectra combined execution-layer and consensus-layer changes and included wallet-facing improvements such as EIP-7702, which can allow standard wallets to behave more like smart accounts in specific cases. That opens the door to features like batching multiple actions into a single transaction or delegating gas payment—steps toward more user-friendly wallet behavior without needing every user to understand account abstraction details.

Pectra also raised the maximum effective stake per validator from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, letting large operators consolidate into fewer validators. The upside is operational efficiency for large stakers; the concern some raise is concentration optics and whether consolidation changes how easily stake can centralize over time.

On the scaling side, Pectra also expanded Ethereum’s capacity for rollup data, reinforcing the direction that L2 data throughput is a core lever for making the ecosystem cheaper to use.

December 2025 — Fusaka

Fusaka (Fulu-Osaka) focused heavily on data availability, including Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS). In simple terms, PeerDAS lets validators verify small samples of rollup data instead of downloading everything. That supports more rollup data per block without requiring validators to run dramatically more powerful hardware.

The intent is straightforward: push more data capacity through the protocol while keeping node requirements manageable, so scaling doesn’t become “only data centers can validate.”

What’s Planned Next: Glamsterdam and Hegota

Ethereum upgrade names and scopes can evolve during development as proposals get refined and tested. But as of the roadmap framing described, these are the two major upgrades most commonly discussed for 2026.

First Half of 2026 — Glamsterdam

Core developers have targeted a mid-2026 upgrade called Glamsterdam as part of the network’s roughly twice-yearly fork cycle, though timing can shift.

The expected focus is scaling the base layer by improving parallel transaction execution and reducing friction in block construction. One commonly discussed direction is enabling more parallelism through block-level access lists, along with integrating proposer-builder separation (ePBS) directly into the protocol to improve block building and throughput.

Glamsterdam is also expected to touch state growth economics—adjusting the cost of state storage to better reflect long-term hardware demands and to reduce database growth pressures over time. Other proposals discussed in the same orbit include validator rule tweaks, lower ETH transfer fees, improved transaction logging, and deterministic contract addresses across chains.

If you run a node or validate, the practical requirement remains the same: you’ll need to update clients in time for the fork so you stay on the canonical chain.

Second Half of 2026 — Hegota

Hegota is discussed as the next major upgrade after Glamsterdam, slated for the second half of 2026, with scope still being defined.

A central goal is adopting Verkle Trees, which allow nodes to verify blockchain data with much smaller proofs and reduce state storage requirements. This pushes Ethereum closer to a more “stateless” design where verification becomes cheaper and hardware demands drop—making it easier for more people to run nodes without compromising on validation quality.

Developers have also explored additions such as Fork-choice Enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL), designed to strengthen censorship resistance, and further smart-account-focused changes that could enable features like gas sponsorship and social recovery—once the underlying proposals are mature enough for inclusion.

What These Upgrades Are Trying to Achieve Overall

Ethereum’s roadmap is less about one breakthrough and more about steady compounding improvements. The upgrades since 2022 have built a clear pattern: move security to proof-of-stake, improve staking usability, dramatically improve rollup economics via data availability upgrades, and keep pushing toward a future where running a node remains feasible for more participants.

At the same time, Ethereum remains a global platform for smart contracts and decentralized applications, which means usability matters as much as raw throughput. Wallet improvements, transaction batching, delegated gas payment, and account-like behavior for standard wallets aren’t “nice-to-haves.” They’re part of making the network easier to use without needing users to understand protocol internals.

As always, the roadmap evolves as research progresses, proposals mature, and changes get tested on devnets and testnets before mainnet deployment. Upgrade names and scopes can change, but the direction stays consistent: faster settlement, cheaper execution through L2s, better data availability, and lower validation overhead.