Ethereum Roadmap Outlook: Glamsterdam, Hegota, and the Future

Authored by: Jason Nelson

Compiled by: Plain Language Blockchain

Like all blockchain projects, Ethereum is not evolving through a single “Ethereum 2.0” event, but through coordinated protocol changes carried out by something known as a hard fork. Since the “The Merge” in September 2022, developers’ focus has been on improving scalability, lowering transaction costs, enhancing nodes** and reducing the hosting burden for running nodes and validators. The Ethereum community’s goal is to ship about two major upgrades per year, with research and testing recovery taken into account.

Ethereum’s Rollup-centric scaling strategy

Ethereum’s scaling plan relies on Layer-2 networks. These are independent blockchains built on top of Ethereum; they process transactions off-chain and then send the results back to Ethereum to ensure security and finality. Many Layer-2 systems use Rollups technology to bundle many transactions’ resources and publish them to Ethereum. This allows Ethereum to support more activity while avoiding the cost of processing every transaction on the mainnet. As a result, most of the cost-intensive development work that is currently focused on Ethereum is on the network and interfaces used by Rollups.

The six phases of the Ethereum roadmap

In July 2022, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described the network roadmap as six phases: The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. These phases are not single upgrades, but broad goals, with multiple phases progressing in parallel.

The Merge (Merge): Completed. Ethereum shifted from proof-of-work to staking, with “Manhattan” reducing by about 99.95%.

The Surge (Surge): In progress. The focus is to scale Ethereum so that Rollups can process more transactions in an even more astonishing way.

The Scourge (Scourge): In progress. Focused on reducing the role of middlemen in block production, addressing and resolving the maximum extractable value (MEV) problem.

The Verge (Verge): In progress. Aims to introduce Verkle trees and related changes, reducing the resources required to verify the Ethereum state.

The Purge (Purge): In progress. Focused on cleaning up data and simplifying the protocol to make Ethereum easier to maintain.

The Splurge (Splurge): Mainly a series of smaller improvements and long-term upgrades aimed at increasing usability and efficiency.

Ethereum upgrade timeline

Ethereum’s roadmap is implemented through a series of hard forks.

Completed upgrades

September 2022 — The Merge (Merge): Ethereum moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Validators are now locking up ETH to secure the network. This upgrade changes the security model, but will directly lower fees or increase speed.

April 2023 — Shanghai/Shapella (Shanghai upgrade): Enabled validator withdrawals, allowing early stakers to withdraw funds.

March 2024 — Dencun (Cancun upgrade): Introduced Proto-Danksharding (EIP-4844). It adds temporary “Blob” storage space, significantly reducing Layer-2 network costs.

May 2025 — Pectra: Combines the Prague and Electra upgrades. Introduced EIP-7702, making ordinary wallet functionality operate like smart accounts (e.g., batch transactions). At the same time, it increases the maximum effective staked amount for validators from 32 ETH to 2,048 ETH, and adds capability to process Rollup data.

December 2025 — Fusaka: Activates PeerDAS (peer data availability sampling), allowing validators to verify rollup data by sampling—thereby avoiding the need to download all data. This supports a larger data capacity without increasing hardware requirements.

Planned and upcoming upgrades

2026 — Glamsterdam (expected): Core developers’ goal is to ship in mid-2026. The focus is to enable more transaction execution via “block-level access lists,” and to have the proposer-builder separation (ePBS) integrated directly into the protocol to improve throughput. In addition, adjust state costs with the growth of time-series databases, and explore lowering ETH cross-chain fees and chain-consistent destination address settings.

Second half of 2026 — Hegota: A key goal is to adopt Verkle trees, which will allow nodes to verify data with extremely small proofs—pushing Ethereum toward a stateless design and reducing labor. Developers are researching FOCIL (Fork Choice Forced Inclusion List) to enhance censorship resistance, and supporting smart-account-related changes for gas subsidization and social features.