Ethereum completes Glamsterdam upgrade, increases gas limit to 200 million to boost on-chain scalability

BlockBeats News, on May 4, Ethereum completed the Glamsterdam upgrade on May 1, significantly increasing the block gas limit from 60 million to 200 million, marking the largest expansion in history. This adjustment has greatly enhanced on-chain throughput capacity and reduced the cost of complex smart contract interactions, aiming to strengthen competitiveness against high-performance public chains.

To address the state bloat and node operational pressure brought by the expansion, this upgrade concurrently introduces Verkle Trees and a State Expunging mechanism, allowing nodes to prune historical data older than one year, which will then be handled by decentralized storage and archival nodes. This helps to maintain stable hardware requirements for validator nodes. In addition, a base fee smoothing mechanism has been introduced to reduce the risk of sharp gas fee fluctuations.

The expansion also has a significant impact on the Layer2 ecosystem. Benefiting from lower mainnet data settlement costs, Rollup fees are expected to decrease by about 70%, prompting mainstream L2s such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base to engage in a fee competition. Analysis suggests that this upgrade further positions the Ethereum mainnet as a high-security settlement layer, while L2s undertake high-frequency, low-cost transaction execution, improving overall ecosystem scalability and user capacity.