Crypto traders may still measure progress in candles, but the calendar for 2026 is increasingly being set by protocol teams rather than price action. Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, and Coinbase’s Base network are all moving toward major infrastructure upgrades—while Bitcoin remains largely stuck in debate, with no clear activation path for the most contentious proposals.
According to Tim Sun, a senior researcher at Hong Kong asset manager HashKey Group, earlier rounds of blockchain development tended to prioritize features, speed, and throughput. In 2026, he argues the emphasis is shifting toward reliability, more predictable governance, and the kind of “institutional-grade” infrastructure that can support large-scale financial use cases.
Key takeaways
- Ethereum’s “Glamsterdam” is targeting better scalability and usability, with changes aimed at improving performance while reducing operational friction on the network.
- Solana’s “Alpenglow” focuses on faster finality through a redesigned consensus component, with an explicit goal of reducing confirmation times and simplifying validator activity.
- Base’s “Beryl” hard fork went live after a brief sequencer-related halt, adding a native token standard and shortening withdrawal finality.
- Avalanche’s next push is less about a single branded hard fork and more about performance improvements plus expanded appeal to institutional and tokenized-asset issuers.
- Bitcoin remains the outlier, with covenant and quantum-resistance proposals still lacking an agreed route to activation.
Ethereum’s Glamsterdam: scalability plus governance design
Ethereum’s Glamsterdam is positioned as the most consequential upgrade on the near-term horizon. Ethereum’s public roadmap says the upgrade is intended to improve scalability, harden the layer-1, and make the network easier to use, with a mainnet launch expected in the second half of 2026. (Ethereum upgrade milestone details are linked by Cointelegraph to Ethereum’s own roadmap updates.)
HashKey’s Tim Sun said Glamsterdam should increase throughput by enabling more transactions to be processed simultaneously and by improving capacity so Ethereum can handle more data at higher rates. He also highlighted an effort to reduce database bloat—changes he expects to make the chain better suited to stablecoin settlement and real-world asset workflows that demand steadier performance.
Holly Atkinson, chief product and technology officer at 1inch, described Glamsterdam as Ethereum’s most significant upgrade since The Merge in September 2022, which moved the network from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. For Atkinson, a central element is enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS). She said the current ecosystem still relies heavily on specialized builders and relays, which can concentrate control over transaction ordering and, in turn, amplify risks tied to maximal extractable value (MEV), censorship, and centralization.
ePBS is meant to shift block building and proposing back into the protocol and make the process more transparent and accountable. However, Solana Foundation judge Pavan Kaur—who also runs a compliance engine for digital asset marketing—cautioned that ePBS should be viewed as one step in a larger roadmap rather than a complete solution. In her view, it does not eliminate MEV or fully resolve builder centralization concerns, meaning some behaviors (such as sandwich attacks) could potentially migrate rather than disappear entirely.
Solana’s Alpenglow: accelerating finality and reworking consensus mechanics
Solana’s headline change for 2026 is Alpenglow, a consensus upgrade aimed at reshaping the network’s core agreement process. After an overwhelming governance approval in September 2025, Alpenglow remains under development, with expectations tied to the later 2026 delivery of the Agave 4.1 validator client release.
At the heart of Alpenglow is a redesign intended to speed up how quickly the network reaches finality. Rather than relying on Solana’s existing TowerBFT-based consensus mechanism, the upgrade introduces a new voting component called Votor. The practical implication, as described in coverage of the upgrade, is a major drop in confirmation times—finality targeted at roughly 100–150 milliseconds in optimal conditions, compared with around 12.8 seconds today.
In addition to speed, Alpenglow removes onchain vote transactions, which currently contribute meaningfully to network activity. By streamlining how validators communicate and coordinate on the chain state, the upgrade is intended to make Solana lighter and more efficient when demand rises.
Hadley Stern, board director at DeFi Development Corp, framed the removal of onchain vote transactions as especially important for institutional allocators, saying it can “clean up validator economics” and produce “honest telemetry” that matters when underwriting SOL as a treasury asset. The broader institutional thesis, he implied, is tied to whether Solana’s governance and consensus changes can be integrated with the level of rigor demanded by regulated capital.
Base’s Beryl: post-outage hard fork adds a token standard and shorter exits
Coinbase’s Base network completed its Beryl hard fork on Friday, following a short sequencer-related outage. In that incident, block production stalled for about two hours after an invalid block triggered a temporary consensus failure. Base co-founder Jesse Pollak said user funds were unaffected, while also emphasizing that “a halt is not okay” and that lessons from the episode will be used to further strengthen Base for “global, 24/7 finance.”
Base’s documentation for Beryl says the upgrade introduces a set of changes intended to tighten network performance and reduce friction at the edges. The listed items include a B20 native token standard, a reduction in withdrawal finality from seven days to five, and integration with Reth V2—expected to lower node storage requirements while improving execution efficiency.
Sun characterized Base’s longer-term technical strategy as moving toward a more unified “stack” approach, giving the network more control over how it is built and upgraded. He said this can allow changes to ship more quickly than the earlier Optimism Superchain model. The trade-off, in his view, is the possibility of more fragmented liquidity—since capital that previously moved more easily across a broader ecosystem may become more constrained even as Base deepens integration with Coinbase’s wider user base.
Avalanche and the push for institutional-grade environments
Avalanche’s roadmap direction for 2026 is framed less around a single branded fork and more around broader performance upgrades while courting institutional participants and tokenized asset issuers. Sun pointed to the recent Etna hard fork as a major step: it replaced the earlier subnet model with sovereign Avalanche L1s, cutting the cost of launching a dedicated blockchain by more than 99% and making it easier for institutions to justify their own deployments.
To support that claim, Sun referenced activity he said demonstrates institutional demand. One example cited was Progmat, described as accounting for around 63% of Japan’s national security token market, which migrated more than $2 billion in tokenized assets to a dedicated Avalanche L1. Another example was the Avalanche Payments Collective supported by firms including Franklin Templeton, VanEck, and WisdomTree.
Meanwhile, Atkinson said Avalanche is pursuing two upgrades aimed at making its C-Chain one of the fastest EVM environments. She highlighted “Streaming Asynchronous Execution,” which separates transaction execution from consensus so the chain can run more continuously and scale capacity closer to normal demand. For users, the expected outcome is higher throughput and lower, steadier fees during high-activity periods.
Bitcoin: no scheduled breakthrough, as covenants and quantum-hardening remain unresolved
Bitcoin stands apart from the rest of the field because 2026’s biggest developments are not tied to a clear upgrade timetable. Instead, the focus remains on unresolved disagreements over how programmable Bitcoin should become—and how urgently it should harden against quantum threats.
Bitcoin hasn’t activated a major soft fork since Taproot in 2020, which expanded scripting flexibility and improved privacy. Since then, debate around covenant-related proposals such as OP_CAT, CheckTemplateVerify (CTV), and Lightning-focused ideas like LNHANCE has intensified, but none has an agreed activation route. Researchers are also discussing proposals such as BIP-360 and related ideas meant to ease migration of coins into quantum-resistant spending paths if the quantum threat becomes practical.
Atkinson described Bitcoin as the group’s wildcard: covenant proposals could unlock safer storage and richer scripting, but they remain divisive. Sun said they could improve aspects of self-custody security, fee management, and protocols like Lightning and Ark, potentially allowing institutions to implement programmable custody logic directly at the L1.
On consensus reality, there is broad agreement—according to the linked comparison coverage—that no covenant opcode is on track for activation this year, and that reaching consensus on proposals like OP_CAT or CTV is still some distance away. On the quantum-resistance track, BIP-360’s authors estimate that moving to quantum-resistant addresses and signatures would take years even under optimistic assumptions, making it unlikely that a quantum-resistance upgrade would be implemented before the end of 2026.
Looking ahead, the clearest near-term signal investors and builders should track is not debate, but delivery: Ethereum’s Glamsterdam mainnet timeline, Solana’s Alpenglow readiness alongside Agave 4.1, and whether Base’s post-Beryl stability improvements hold under sustained load. For Bitcoin, the key question is whether any covenant or quantum-hardening proposals can shift from discussion to an actual, shared activation path.
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