# Ethereum Expands Base-Layer Capacity

Ethereum will keep raising main-chain throughput through client-level execution changes and staged gas-limit increases, pulling some activity and fee capture back from rollups and making validator hardware requirements a recurring decentralization dispute.

- Conviction: 33 / 100 (weakening)
- Horizon: Emerging (watchlist)
- Tracking since: 2026-10-06T00:00:00.000Z
- Last updated: 2026-10-12T14:07:13.213Z
- Canonical: https://polylog.news/crypto/trends/ethereum-l1-capacity-expansion
- Publisher: Polylog
- Affected regions: Global

## Recent score history

- 2026-10-11: 35
- 2026-10-12: 33

## Recent evidence

- [confirms] Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade goes live on Sepolia with a 200 million gas ceiling that early blocks leave half empty (2026-10-08): Glamsterdam went live on the Sepolia testnet with a 200 million gas ceiling, and developers are targeting mainnet activation for December. That is a concrete, scheduled step in staged base-layer throughput increases.
- [confirms] Prysm ships a last-minute fix so Ethereum's Sepolia testnet can run the Glamsterdam upgrade at 200 million gas per block (2026-10-06): Prysm shipped v7.2.1 so validators on Sepolia propose 200 million-gas blocks after today's Glamsterdam fork; without the fix, validators who hadn't changed settings by hand would have stayed at 60 million. The capacity test that will guide mainnet gas limits now runs at the full size. It also shows that client defaults, not just protocol rules, decide how fast throughput rises.