What does the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade mean?

Author: Blue Fox; Source: X, @lanhubiji

In the past two days, many people in the English community have mentioned that after the Glamsterdam upgrade, Ethereum L1 gas limit will be directly increased from the current 60M to a minimum of 200M.

What does this mean?

It essentially means that L1 execution capacity will be more than tripled, with further doubling expected in the future. Coupled with technologies like ePBS, BAL optimization, gas repricing, etc., L1 throughput will be significantly improved. Without a sudden surge in demand, L1 fees could remain very low for a long time, even making users hardly notice.

So, what does this imply for Ethereum L2 or other high-performance public chains?

First, Ethereum L1 fees will approach L2, or even become nearly the same.

Currently, L1 regular transfer fees are already quite low (about $0.1-$0.4). After the upgrade, if gas prices are further pushed down to around 0.01-0.05 gwei, many simple transactions can be done directly on L1 without needing L2. First, there’s an additional bridge/withdrawal cost, and second, L1 is still safer than L2.

One of the core selling points of L2 in the past—“much cheaper than L1”—will be greatly weakened.

Second, the economic model of L2 faces adjustments.

L2 itself also needs to pack data into L1 (data availability). When L1 becomes cheaper, it’s a positive for L2 (reduction in rollup costs), but at the same time, if L1 itself becomes “sufficient and cheap,” many applications might choose to deploy directly on L1 (especially in DeFi, NFT, gaming scenarios that don’t require ultra-high TPS).

This also forces L2 to upgrade. To stay competitive, L2 must differentiate itself in speed, customizable execution environments, and specific application optimizations (such as zk proof speed, account abstraction, perp-specific chains, etc.), rather than relying solely on “cheapness.”

The evolutionary trend is that, besides a few general-purpose L2s like Base and Arbitrum, more future application-specific chains like Lighter and Ronin may emerge. This will also influence projects like Polymarket to choose to deploy on Ethereum L2.

In the short term, Ethereum L1 may seem to generate less fee revenue; but in the long run, this will greatly enhance Ethereum’s ecosystem control, ultimately translating into more fee income.

Finally, the pressure on high-performance public chains increases significantly.

In the past, high-performance chains used “ETH L1 is slow and expensive” as a selling point. Now, ETH L1 suddenly becomes “fast, cheap, highly secure, with the deepest liquidity, and the most comprehensive developer ecosystem,” which severely compresses the differentiation advantage of high-performance public chains.

Unless they can continue to significantly lead in actual TPS, finality, developer experience, and capital efficiency, many projects and users may reassess whether it’s worth leaving the Ethereum ecosystem.

This will lead to a trend: except for one or two high-performance chains, most other high-performance chains will gradually become part of the Ethereum ecosystem, with more projects and users shifting towards Ethereum L1 and L2.

This upgrade marks a return to Ethereum’s “single-chain narrative”: the L1 first expands capacity, and L2 continues to layer on top.

For L2 project teams: short-term benefits (cost reduction), mid-term pressures (proving they are more valuable than L1).

For other public chains: the competition threshold is raised again.