Ethereum completes Glamsterdam upgrade, Gas limit increased to 200 million to promote on-chain scalability

BlockBeats News, May 4th: Ethereum completed the Glamsterdam upgrade on May 1st, significantly increasing the block gas limit from 60 million to 200 million, marking the largest expansion in history. This adjustment greatly enhances on-chain throughput, reduces the costs of complex smart contract interactions, and aims to strengthen competitiveness among high-performance public chains.

To address the state bloat and node operation pressures caused by the expansion, this upgrade also introduces Verkle Trees and a state expunging mechanism, allowing nodes to remove historical data older than one year, which is then handled by decentralized storage and archival nodes, thereby maintaining stable hardware requirements for validation nodes. Additionally, a base fee smoothing mechanism is introduced to reduce the risk of sharp fluctuations in gas fees.

The expansion also has a significant impact on the Layer 2 ecosystem. Benefiting from lower mainnet data settlement costs, Rollup fees are expected to decrease by approximately 70%, encouraging fee competition among mainstream L2s such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base. Analysts believe this upgrade will further position the Ethereum mainnet as a high-security settlement layer, while L2s handle high-frequency, low-cost transaction execution, collectively improving ecosystem scalability and user capacity.