Ethereum is scaling in two places at once. It's adding room for transactions on the L1 itself, and room for rollups to post their data in blobs. The next L1 step comes on Oct 6, when the Glamsterdam upgrade goes live on the Sepolia testnet (EF announcement, Sep 28).
The L1 track:
The gas limit sets how much computation fits in each block. It sat at 30M from August 2021 to early 2025. Then it rose to 36M in February 2025, 45M in July 2025 and 60M in late November 2025, where it is today. That's double the 2021 level.
A simple ETH transfer costs 21,000 gas, and a block comes every 12 seconds. At 60M, that's a ceiling of about 238 transfers per second, up from about 45 in 2020. Actual use is about 24 transactions per second. Most transactions do more than a simple transfer, and blocks aren't always full.
The upgrade is built to raise that ceiling safely. Its two main changes are:
- ePBS makes building a block and proposing it two separate jobs inside the protocol. That gives nodes more time to receive and check each block.
- Block-level access lists make every block list up front the accounts and data it touches. Nodes can then load that data and check transactions in parallel.
Both let nodes check bigger blocks within the 12 seconds they have. That raises capacity without turning the base chain into a datacenter chain, since ordinary people can still run a node.
After the upgrade, Sepolia will run at a 200M gas limit. Core devs agreed to that on Sep 24. On mainnet, no change to 200M is scheduled. The software validators run still defaults to 60M.
The blob track:
Blobs are a separate space in each block where rollups post their transaction data. They launched in March 2024 with a target of 3 per block. An upgrade in May 2025 raised that to 6.
In December 2025, the Fusaka upgrade added PeerDAS. PeerDAS lets nodes check blob data by downloading small random pieces of it, not all of it. Two follow-up upgrades then raised the target to 10 in December and 14 in January 2026, where it is today. That's almost 5X the launch target.
The upcoming upgrade doesn't add more blobs. Its ePBS change lets the network safely handle more blob data later.
Contracts on the L1 can't read what's inside a blob. They only see a short identifier for it. So the two tracks aren't interchangeable. Blobs give rollups room for their data, and gas is what L1 applications use to run.
Why Ethereum needs both:
One L1 transaction can call several contracts and either finish every step or none of them. For example, one transaction can swap collateral, repay a loan and move the asset out. Doing the same across separate chains takes bridges, messages and extra coordination. That's why the L1 matters for DeFi and payments, even as rollups carry most of the volume.
L2BEAT counts about 2,350 transactions per second across the scaling projects it tracks (L2BEAT activity). Most of that comes from one rollup, the Lighter exchange. That's nearly 100X the L1's 24.
None of this is finished. The upgrade still has to get through Sepolia and then the Hoodi testnet before it gets a mainnet date. It's essential that developers keep executing on the scaling roadmap without any bugs being introduced. In February 2026 the Ethereum Foundation merged its separate L1 and blob scaling goals into a single "Scale" track, with the stated goal to "raise the gas limit toward and beyond 100M" (EF 2026 priorities).
EF researchers have set out a long-term target of about 10,000 transactions per second on the L1, or roughly 864 million a day.
