Ethereum’s next major upgrade moved further into testing after core developers gathered in Svalbard, Norway, for a week-long interop event focused on hardening Glamsterdam.
The Ethereum Foundation’s May 2026 Protocol Cluster update confirmed several milestones tied to execution, block-building, gas capacity, and the upgrade path that follows Glamsterdam. The event brought together Ethereum client teams for multi-client testing, giving developers a shared environment to stress the upgrade before it moves closer to mainnet readiness.
A post-Glamsterdam gas limit floor of 200 million is now considered a credible target, supported by progress across ePBS, BAL optimizations, and EIP-8037 repricing. The gas-limit work is important because Ethereum’s scaling roadmap increasingly depends on safely expanding capacity without weakening node performance, block propagation, or validator reliability.
Developers also stabilized ePBS, or enshrined proposer-builder separation, through a multi-client Glamsterdam devnet. The Foundation said the external builders pipeline was tested end to end across nearly all clients. ePBS is designed to bring parts of Ethereum’s block-building market deeper into the protocol, reducing reliance on external relay assumptions while preserving the separation between validators that propose blocks and builders that assemble transaction payloads.
EIP-8037 also reached a finalized state during the interop event. The update adopts a fixed cost_per_state_byte model, with full repricing numbers delivered on bal-devnet-6. State growth remains one of Ethereum’s long-running technical constraints, since higher state load can increase operational pressure on nodes and make future scaling more difficult if pricing does not reflect resource costs.
The same update also pushed Hegotá further into view as the upgrade expected to follow Glamsterdam. Developers laid groundwork for FOCIL, with functional prototypes already in place and native account abstraction requirements scoped. A multi-client devnet is the next immediate step for that work.
FOCIL, short for Fork-choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, is scheduled as a consensus-layer headliner for Hegotá. The feature is aimed at improving Ethereum’s censorship-resistance path by giving the protocol stronger tools to ensure transaction inclusion under stressed or adversarial block-building conditions.
The Foundation also confirmed a leadership transition inside the Protocol Cluster. Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko are moving on from the Ethereum Foundation, while Alex Stokes will take a sabbatical. Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik will become the new Protocol Cluster leads.
The outgoing leadership group helped organize Protocol tracks and contributed to shipping Fusaka to mainnet in December 2025, including PeerDAS and gas-limit work linked to Ethereum’s longer path toward higher throughput. The incoming leads bring coverage across research coordination, zkEVM engineering, protocol security, post-quantum consensus work, and cross-cluster planning.
The leadership handoff is taking place while Glamsterdam devnets are already live and Hegotá scoping is underway. That timing keeps Ethereum’s protocol roadmap centered on execution reliability, block-building reform, state pricing, inclusion guarantees, and higher capacity rather than a single headline feature.
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