Ethereum Completes Glamsterdam Upgrade, Gas Limit Increased to 200 Million to Boost On-Chain Scalability

On May 4th, Ethereum announced it successfully completed the **Glamsterdam Upgrade** on May 1st—marking the largest capacity expansion in its history by raising the block gas limit from 60 million to 200 million. This adjustment significantly boosts on-chain throughput, lowers costs for complex smart contract interactions, and aims to strengthen the high-performance public chain’s competitiveness. To tackle state bloat and operational strain on nodes from the expansion, the upgrade introduces **Verkle Trees** and a **State Expunging mechanism**: nodes can prune historical data older than one year and offload it to decentralized storage/archive nodes, keeping validator hardware requirements manageable. A **base fee smoothing mechanism** is also rolled out to mitigate gas fee volatility risks. The expansion has major Layer 2 ecosystem implications: thanks to reduced mainnet data settlement costs, Rollup costs are projected to drop by roughly 70%, spurring fee competition among leading Layer 2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base. Analysts note the upgrade will cement Ethereum’s mainnet as a high-security settlement layer, with Layer 2s handling high-frequency, low-cost transactions—ultimately boosting the ecosystem’s overall scalability and user capacity.