The Roadmap Never Ends: Why Ethereum is Already Looking to 2026
The dust from the Fusaka upgrade hasn’t even settled, and the Ethereum developer machine is already grinding toward the next horizon. If you’ve been around since the 2017 ICO craze or watched the 2022 Merge from the trenches, you know the drill: the roadmap is a moving target, and “soon” is a relative term in the world of decentralized consensus. While 2025 was a year dominated by the “scaling” narrative—mostly focused on making Layer 2s like Arbitrum and Optimism cheaper—the focus is finally shifting back to the mother ship. Ethereum Mainnet is getting an overhaul.
The next stops on this perpetual journey are codenamed Glamsterdam and Hegota. Glamsterdam, slated for a 2026 release, isn’t just another incremental patch. It represents a fundamental pivot in how Ethereum handles transactions and who gets to decide what makes it into a block. For the traders and DeFi degens who stayed through the 2022 crash, these upgrades are the answer to a nagging question: Can Ethereum Mainnet ever be fast and cheap enough to compete with the high-throughput upstarts, or is it destined to be a high-priced settlement layer for L2s?
Glamsterdam: Parallel Processing and the End of the Bottleneck
For years, Ethereum’s biggest handicap has been its sequential execution. Transactions are processed one by one, like a single-file line at a crowded bodega. Glamsterdam aims to break that line with block-level access lists. In plain English, this enables parallel processing. By specifying which parts of the state a transaction will touch, the network can process unrelated transactions simultaneously. If you’re swapping ETH for USDC on Uniswap and someone else is minting an NFT, there’s no technical reason they should be waiting on each other. Glamsterdam fixes this.
This isn’t just a “quality of life” update. For DeFi protocols, this means more predictable gas fees and significantly higher throughput. We saw the chaos of the 2020 DeFi Summer when gas prices made small trades impossible. Parallel execution is the tech required to ensure that the next bull run doesn’t price out the retail user again. Beyond that, Glamsterdam will introduce Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS).
Currently, the relationship between people who propose blocks (validators) and people who build them (specialized builders) is a bit of a Wild West governed by third-party software like MEV-Boost. By “enshrining” this into the protocol, Ethereum aims to lower the cost of using the chain and increase the speed at which blocks are finalized. It also aims to curb the influence of a handful of dominant builders who have increasingly become the gatekeepers of the network. This isn’t just about speed; it’s about power.
The FOCIL Debate: Ethereum’s Fight for Neutrality
If Glamsterdam is about performance, Hegota—the upgrade following it—is about survival. The headline feature under debate is FOCIL (Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists). This is where the technical meets the political, and it’s where the community is most divided. Since the 2022 OFAC sanctions against Tornado Cash, a chilling effect has permeated the validator set. At one point, nearly 90% of validators were skipping blocks that contained “blacklisted” transactions. This is a direct threat to Ethereum’s core promise of “credible neutrality.”
FOCIL is designed to strip builders of their power to censor. It allows a distributed set of validators to mandate that certain transactions must be included in a block. If a builder tries to ignore them, the block is rejected. It sounds like a win for decentralization, but not everyone is convinced. Critics like Ameen Soleimani, founder of Privacy Pools, argue that this creates a massive legal bullseye for US-based validators. If the protocol forces a validator to include a sanctioned transaction, they aren’t just running code; they are potentially committing a felony in the eyes of the US government.
This echoes the legal drama surrounding Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm. The industry is currently walking a tightrope between building censorship-resistant tech and keeping its contributors out of prison. Tim Clancy, a prominent rollup developer, calls FOCIL the “single most important” proposal for Ethereum’s mission. Without it, Ethereum is just a slower, more expensive version of a centralized database. The debate officially kicks off on January 8, when developers start hashing out the Hegota specs. Expect fireworks.
Market Context: 2025 Was the Year of the Great Disconnect
Looking back at the tail end of 2025, the market has been a strange beast. While the headline prices for BTC and ETH stayed robust, they remained stubbornly below their 2021-era all-time highs. We’ve moved past the “fever dream” of the NFT bubble—which, let’s be honest, feels like an ancient civilization at this point—and into a phase of institutional sobriety. The success of 2025 wasn’t measured in “moon shots” but in infrastructure resilience. The 2017 version of me would be shocked that we’re even talking about ePBS or parallel execution; back then, we were just hoping the network wouldn’t crash because of a cat-breeding game.
The industry has matured. We’ve survived the collapse of FTX and the subsequent regulatory onslaught, but the scars remain. The push for FOCIL and ePBS is a direct response to those scars. It’s an admission that decentralization isn’t just a marketing buzzword—it’s a defensive necessity. If the network can be squeezed by a few builders or a single government, it has no value. This is the “cynical editor” take: we don’t build these features because we’re idealists; we build them because, without them, the whole thing is a house of cards.
Risk Assessment: The Cost of Delay
The biggest risk to Ethereum isn’t a hack or a regulatory ban; it’s irrelevance. The roadmap is long. Glamsterdam isn’t coming until 2026, and Hegota doesn’t even have a target date. In the crypto world, a year is an eternity. While Ethereum devs debate the nuances of inclusion lists, competitors are shipping and scaling. The “slow and steady” approach worked for the transition to Proof-of-Stake, but the market is becoming increasingly impatient.
Furthermore, the legal risks associated with FOCIL cannot be ignored. If the US government decides that forcing transaction inclusion is equivalent to aiding and abetting, we could see a massive exodus of US-based validators and capital. This would lead to a “fork” of a different kind—a geographical fragmentation of the network that would be devastating for liquidity. Ethereum is betting big that it can solve the “Trilemma” (security, scalability, decentralization) without getting crushed by the very regulators it’s trying to circumvent. It’s a high-stakes game, and 2026 is a long way off. Stay skeptical, keep your keys off exchanges, and remember: in crypto, the only constant is the next upgrade.
Disclaimer: This analysis is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Crypto markets are highly volatile; never invest more than you can afford to lose.
