What's genuinely weird and ironic about Ethereum current situation? A chain that everyone has written off is about to 10x its capacity, cut fees 78%, and fix the exact problem that caused the narrative to collapse. Glamsterdam targets every criticisms in one package and it's happening below the radar 👇 1⃣ The Problem Nobody Wants to Admit The start of the story is March 2024 with with Dencun. → EIP-4844 gave L2s dedicated "blob space" for data availability. Fees on @arbitrum, @base, and @optimism dropped 90%+. Users won. Activity migrated off mainnet. The scaling roadmap worked. But here's the part that quietly broke the ETH investment thesis. → The EIP-1559 burn mechanism (the deflationary engine behind "ultrasound money") runs on L1 base fees. When blob space separated L2 data posting from L1 competition, it launched with more supply than demand. Blob fees sat near zero. The burn rate collapsed. The paradox was brutal: the more successful the scaling strategy, the less ETH got burned. Ethereum built something great for its users and hollowed out its own monetary premium in the process. → @base alone captured over 80% of L2 transaction fees through 2025. → @coinbase was building a profitable, growing business on Ethereum's rails, returning close to nothing to L1. Some called it parasitic. Others called it the plan working. The honest answer sits somewhere in between. Either way, ETH holders paid the price. Narrative capital rotated hard to Solana, to Sui, to anything with a cleaner story. That's the hole Glamsterdam is designed to fill 🕳 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2⃣ What's Actually Being Built Three technical workstreams are converging. The way they interact is what makes this more than routine protocol maintenance: ① Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS): Ethereum currently outsources a core function of its own block production. Validators propose blocks, but transaction ordering runs through external relays operating off-chain, outside Ethereum's direct control. → MEV flows through this shadow infrastructure. EIP-7732 brings block building on-chain: the proposer commits to a block header. A separate builder constructs the execution payload with protocol-enforced deadlines. No more external relay or trusted intermediaries. → For DeFi users: MEV extraction drops by up to 70%. Fairer execution. Tighter spreads. Better outcomes for anyone trading or providing liquidity on L1. → For the protocol: Ethereum stops depending on Flashbots for its own functioning. ② Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928): It represents the engine behind the gas limit expansion. BALs let clients pre-fetch the full read/write set for a block before execution begins. Transactions run in parallel instead of sequentially. Batched I/O. Parallel state-root computation. Without BALs, tripling the gas limit would just amplify existing bottlenecks. With BALs, the architecture actually scales. → Throughput target: ~10,000 TPS. That's roughly 10x Ethereum's current effective L1 output. ③ State Creation Cost Increase (EIP-8037) The least talked about but probably the most important for long-term health. A higher gas limit without controls on state growth means Ethereum's state (every contract, address, and storage slot) expands unboundedly. → Nodes get heavier → Decentralization quietly erodes EIP-8037 raises the gas cost of writing new state, keeping growth proportionate to actual resource usage. → The gas limit expands 3.3x. The state doesn't bloat to match it. Together, these three EIPs converge on a post-Glamsterdam gas limit floor of 200M, up from 60M today. Ethereum Foundation protocol support lead @TimBeiko confirmed a further doubling is already on the roadmap shortly after. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3⃣ Dismantling the Bear Case The standard ETH bear case since 2024 runs on three rails: ① Can't compete on speed and cost ② L2 ecosystem cannibalizes its own monetary premium ③ The ultrasound money thesis is structurally broken Glamsterdam takes each one head-on. 1- Speed and cost → 200M gas limit with parallel execution targets ~10,000 TPS. → Gas fees estimated to drop ~78% across simple transfers and smart contract calls. → The cost gap with Solana (which has been the central narrative weapon against ETH) narrows materially. Activity that migrated to L2s because L1 was too expensive now has a reason to reconsider. 2- Value accrual The ultrasound money thesis was always about the relationship between network activity and fee burn. Dencun's problem was supply outrunning demand: fees near zero, burn near zero. Glamsterdam expands supply while making L1 cheap enough to pull back demand that was priced out entirely. Think about what lives at that intersection: tokenized RWAs, high-frequency DeFi rebalancing, institutional settlement, stablecoin flows. All viable on Ethereum L1. All economically constrained by gas costs: until now. More transactions at lower cost per unit can generate more aggregate burn than fewer expensive ones. Especially approaching 10,000 TPS scale. 3- MEV and L1 DeFi quality ePBS is the most underpriced piece of this upgrade for active traders. 70% less MEV is a direct, material improvement. No bridge risk. No 7-day optimistic rollup withdrawal window. No bridging fees. L1 DeFi becomes genuinely competitive again and on multiple dimensions at once. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4⃣ The L2 Question One honest tension worth naming: → Base holds 55% of all L2 transaction volume. → Arbitrum holds ~31% of L2 DeFi TVL. But there's a category of activity that has never fully committed to L2s: institutional and RWA flows. Large capital is cautious about rollup complexity and 7-day exit windows. The DTCC just set a July window for a tokenized securities pilot. Securitize became the first broker-dealer approved to custody tokenized securities. This capital is coming onchain and where it lands depends on execution environment quality: → A faster, cheaper L1 with on-chain block building and reduced MEV is a more credible institutional settlement layer than what Ethereum was 12 months ago. → ARB at $0.20 with monthly unlock pressure and no built-in yield is already quietly pricing some of this in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5⃣ The Thesis Glamsterdam can't be considered a catalyst in the traditional crypto sense. What it is: a structural re-rating opportunity on an asset the market is currently pricing as slow, expensive, narratively exhausted, and competitively outpaced. The asset being built: → ~10,000 TPS execution environment with near-zero fees → On-chain block construction, no relay dependency → 70% less MEV at the protocol level → A deflationary mechanism that reactivates as L1 recaptures flows it lost Three tailwinds converge: [1] Monetary re-rating L1 activity returns → burn rate recovers → the "ETH is inflationary" narrative loses its edge. @hasufl put it plainly on X: almost nobody outside the developer community has priced this in yet. [2] Institutional legitimacy ePBS gives ETH a clean on-chain block construction story. Combined with BlackRock's ETF presence and growing staking yield products, Glamsterdam completes the institutional-grade settlement layer argument. [3] Competitive repricing Solana's TPS advantage over Ethereum L1 has been one of the dominant capital rotation narratives of 2025. At 10,000 L1 TPS, the gap compresses. The narrative doesn't reverse overnight. But the gap that justified the rotation narrows significantly. The market is pricing Ethereum as a slow, expensive chain with a broken monetary thesis. The chain shipping in the next few months is none of those things. As always, DYOR. Timelines can slip. Demand may not meet expanded supply. The deflationary narrative is not guaranteed to reassert. But the setup is as asymmetric as ETH has looked in over a year, and it's developing in near-total silence. Which is, of course, exactly how Ethereum operates.