Ethereum targets tens‑of‑thousands tps

Ethereum’s 2026 plan is not a pivot away from rollups. It is a decision to push them harder. (blog.ethereum.org) A rollup is a side lane for transactions: it bundles activity off the main chain, then posts compressed proof and data back to Ethereum. Ethereum’s own roadmap says that is how the network scales, rather than trying to fit every transaction directly on layer 1. (ethereum.org 1) (ethereum.org 2) The Ethereum Foundation said on February 18 that protocol work for 2026 is now organized into three tracks: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1. The change came after Pectra and Fusaka, two 2025 upgrades that the foundation said cleared earlier near-term goals. (blog.ethereum.org) Those 2025 upgrades added the plumbing for more throughput. Ethereum says Pectra doubled blob throughput, while Fusaka brought Peer Data Availability Sampling, or PeerDAS, to mainnet and enabled an 8x increase in theoretical blob capacity. (blog.ethereum.org) (ethereum.org) Blobs are temporary packets of rollup data, like receipts stored long enough for the network to check them and then discarded. Ethereum says that shift makes rollup transactions cheaper because the data no longer has to live onchain forever. (ethereum.org 1) (ethereum.org 2) PeerDAS changes how nodes verify those packets. Instead of downloading every blob in full, nodes sample pieces of the data, which cuts bandwidth demands and lets Ethereum raise blob limits without pushing node hardware sharply higher. (blog.ethereum.org) (ethereum.org) Ethereum says Fusaka also introduced Blob Parameter Only forks, a lighter mechanism for increasing blob targets between major named upgrades. The foundation said those settings started moving the per-block blob target from 6 toward 10 and then 14 after Fusaka went live on December 3, 2025. (blog.ethereum.org) (ethereum.org) The base chain is getting bigger too, but more slowly. The foundation said the community raised Ethereum mainnet’s gas limit from 30 million to 60 million by early 2026, after first targeting 45 million in mid-2025 and sketching a path toward 100 million and beyond. (blog.ethereum.org 1) (blog.ethereum.org 2) The long-range target is far above “tens of thousands.” Ethereum.org says danksharding, the fuller version of this roadmap, is meant to make more than 100,000 transactions per second possible, with users eventually benefiting from transactions costing less than one-tenth of a cent. (ethereum.org) (ethereum.org) The next named upgrades on Ethereum’s public roadmap are Glamsterdam in the first half of 2026 and Hegotá in the second half. For now, the network’s scaling story is still the same one: keep Ethereum as the settlement layer, and move most user activity onto cheaper rollups. (ethereum.org)