Ethereum punched past $3,500 in Saturday trading to reach $3,548, its highest level since January 18, after the Ethereum Foundation confirmed June 1 as the mainnet activation date for the long-anticipated Glamsterdam upgrade. The hard fork will increase the gas limit from 60 million to 200 million units, enable native rollup compression via PeerDAS, and introduce a new fee market design that targets sub-cent transaction costs at scale.
The confirmation came after the upgrade successfully cleared its final dress rehearsal on the Hoodi testnet on Friday, processing 14.2 million transactions over a 72-hour stress test without a single consensus issue. Vitalik Buterin, in a Saturday post on Mirror, called the Hoodi performance "the best technical milestone for Ethereum since the Merge" and confirmed that no client teams have requested additional delays.
Throughput Implications
Glamsterdam represents an order-of-magnitude improvement in Ethereum's effective throughput. Mainnet capacity will rise from approximately 15 transactions per second to a sustained ~50 TPS, but the more transformative impact comes from PeerDAS, which expands the data availability throughput available to Layer 2 rollups. Combined Layer 2 capacity is expected to exceed 100,000 TPS by the end of 2026, finally putting Ethereum on competitive footing with high-performance alternatives.
The upgrade also introduces important economic improvements. The new fee market separates execution fees from data availability fees, making transaction pricing more predictable for both users and applications. Modeling by Etherscan founder Matthew Tan suggests that average transaction fees on the Ethereum mainnet could fall from $1.20 to $0.35 within 90 days of activation, with Layer 2 fees declining toward $0.005.
Staking Yield Boost
Glamsterdam also delivers an important boost to Ethereum staking economics. The upgrade reduces the effective issuance rate by approximately 11% through more efficient validator economics, while increased on-chain activity is expected to lift fee burn from the current 1.4 ETH per minute to approximately 4.0 ETH