Ethereum Researchers Sketch Post-Glamsterdam Scaling and Forced-Inclusion Plumbing

Ethereum's research forum has produced two technical posts that outline the network's next steps after its planned Glamsterdam upgrade. The first works through what a later upgrade, referred to as Hegota, would need to change to keep raising the gas limit, using the cost of a standard 21,000-gas ether transfer as the anchor for pricing both execution and bandwidth. Tying throughput to that base operation is an attempt to scale capacity without letting the cost of the network's most fundamental action drift away from its real resource use.

The second proposal repurposes a tool built for censorship resistance. FOCIL, short for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, was designed so that a committee of validators can force transactions into blocks that a profit-seeking block builder might otherwise leave out. The new post argues the same mechanism could serve as a forced-transaction mechanism for layer-2 networks, giving users of those rollups a guaranteed path to settle on the base chain even if a rollup's operator stalls or censors them.

Both threads sit within Ethereum's larger effort to restructure who controls the block-building supply chain and to limit maximal extractable value (MEV), the profit a sequencer can capture by reordering transactions. The work is early-stage research, not deployed code, and the referenced standards sit at very different stages of inclusion. The direction is consistent. Scale layer-2 throughput while preserving the right of any user to reach the base layer.