From Ethereum’s Glamsterdam to Solana’s Alpenglow, 2026’s most important developments are protocol upgrades, not price charts.
Most crypto investors still obsess over price charts. But in 2026, a growing share of attention is shifting back to improving the fundamentals of the protocols.
Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche are preparing some of their largest protocol upgrades in years, while Coinbase’s Base network rolled out its Beryl hard fork last Friday in a bid to streamline the network, with a native token standard and shorter withdrawal windows.
Bitcoin development however, remains frozen, with developers still arguing over controversial covenant proposals and post-quantum computing upgrades.
Tim Sun, a senior researcher at Hong Kong-based asset manager HashKey Group, told Cointelegraph that protocol upgrades have historically focused on adding features, speed and throughput.
However, in 2026, he said the emphasis is shifting toward reliability, predictable governance, and institutional-grade infrastructure that can support large-scale financial use cases.
Here are the top five major blockchain upgrades to watch in the second half of 2026.
Glamsterdam is arguably the most consequential upgrade this year, and its already being tested on devnets. According to Ethereum’s public roadmap, Glamsterdam is designed to improve scalability, harden the layer-1, and make the network easier to use, with a mainnet launch expected sometime in the second half of 2026.
Sun said the upgrade should improve processing speeds by allowing more transactions to be processed simultaneously, expand capacity so Ethereum can handle more data at higher throughput, and reduce database bloat. Those changes should make the chain better suited for stablecoin settlement and real-world asset use cases, he said.
Related: Ethereum’s much-hated staking 'tax' may already be obsolete
Holly Atkinson, chief product and technology officer at 1inch, told Cointelegraph that Glamsterdam is viewed by many as Ethereum’s most significant upgrade since The Merge in September 2022, which transitioned the blockchain from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
She said enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) is a key change because most validators still depend on a small set of specialized builders and relays, which concentrates control over transaction ordering.
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