Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap includes this validator risk thats bigger than you think

BALs are framed as plumbing for parallelism.

The EIP cites parallel disk reads, parallel transaction validation, parallel state-root computation, and “executionless state updates,” while estimating about 70 to 72 KiB average compressed BAL size as overhead, according to EIP-7928.

In practice, those gains only materialize if clients adopt concurrency across the real bottlenecks.

They also depend on whether the extra data and verification steps avoid becoming their own latency tax.

ePBS sits at the center of both MEV and throughput discussions because it aims to decouple execution validation from consensus validation in time, according to EIP-7732.

That temporal slack is also where new failure modes can show up.

An academic paper on the “free option problem” for ePBS estimates option exercise at about 0.82% of blocks on average under an 8-second option window, reaching about 6% on high-volatility days in its modeled conditions, according to arXiv.

Ethereum in 2026

For 2026 planning, that research pushes attention toward liveness under stress, not only steady-state fee outcomes.

The more structural bet behind “very high” gas limits is validator ZK-proof adoption.

The Ethereum Foundations “Realtime Proving” roadmap describes a staged path where a small set of validators first runs ZK clients in production.

Then, only after a supermajority of stake is comfortable, gas limits can rise to levels where proof verification replaces re-execution for practical validation on reasonable hardware, according to the foundations July 10, 2025 post on blog.ethereum.org.

The same post lays out constraints that matter for feasibility rather than narrative, including targeting 128-bit security (with 100-bit accepted temporarily), proof size under 300 KiB, and avoiding reliance on recursive wrappers with trusted setups, according to blog.ethereum.org.

The scaling implication is tied to proving markets: real-time proof supply has to be cheap and credible without concentrating into a narrow prover set that recreates todays relay-style dependencies in another layer of the stack.

After Glamsterdam, “Hegota” is positioned as a later-2026 named slot that is still about process more than scope.

The Ethereum Foundation published a headliner timeline with a Jan. 8 to Feb. 4 proposal window, followed by Feb. 5 to Feb. 26 discussion and finalization, then a window for non-headliners, according to blog.ethereum.org.

A Hegotá meta-EIP exists as draft (EIP-8081) and lists items as considered rather than locked, including FOCIL (EIP-7805) as currently considered, according to EIP-8081.

The near-term reporting value in that schedule is that it creates dated decision points investors and builders can track without inferring commitments from codenames.