KoinlyticsEthereum enters August with two storylines pulling in opposite directions. On the protocol side, core developers have locked the specification bundle for Glamsterdam, the largest consensus and execution change since the Merge. On the market side, the Layer 2 ecosystem is finishing a brutal consolidation that has left Base and Arbitrum One controlling roughly 80% of total value secured across all rollups, with smaller networks losing users at double-digit rates.
Spot ETH is trading around $1,867 at the start of the month, roughly 62% below its August 2025 all-time high of $4,953, with 24-hour volume down more than 55% from the prior session. Spot Ethereum ETFs posted a net outflow of $6.40 million on July 31, ending the month with approximately $13.71 billion in combined assets under management.
Glamsterdam devnet-0 is live
The Glamsterdam upgrade has entered devnet-0, the final coordination step before public testnets on Holesky and Hoodi. The fork ships ten Ethereum Improvement Proposals tracked under Meta EIP-7773. Two of them do the structural work:
- EIP-7732 (ePBS): enshrines Proposer-Builder Separation directly in the protocol, formally separating the validator that proposes a slot from the builder that assembles the execution payload. This removes a large chunk of the current dependency on out-of-protocol relays used by MEV-Boost.
- EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists): forces builders to publish, at block level, which state each transaction will touch. Nodes can then prefetch state and execute non-overlapping transactions in parallel.
The combined target is a 200 million gas limit at mainnet, roughly triple the current ceiling near 60 million. Client teams have cited an upper bound of about 10,000 TPS-equivalent throughput under realistic workloads, though this figure assumes parallel execution behaves as modeled in production.
The internal working target for mainnet activation is late 2026. Historical precedent of two to four months of public testnet soak time puts realistic activation between October and December, not August. Any earlier date circulating on social channels is not backed by a client release schedule.
Layer 2: two winners, many zombies
The rollup market has collapsed into a duopoly. According to research cited by 21Shares, Base and Arbitrum One together secure roughly 80% of L2 value:
- Base holds approximately $11.5 billion in TVS, or about 40% of the market, and generated an estimated $60 to $70 million in sequencer revenue during the first half of 2026.
- Arbitrum One holds approximately $10.1 billion, or about 39% share, with H1 sequencer revenue in the $35 to $45 million range.
- Optimism averages around 82,000 daily active addresses on OP Mainnet, with the OP Stack Superchain now spanning more than 30 chains sharing security and messaging.
Beyond the top three, activity is thinning. Research from BlockEden and others tracks a 61% drop in usage across smaller rollups over the past year, with more than fifty considered effectively inactive. Standard Chartered previously estimated that Base alone has removed roughly $50 billion from ETH's market capitalization by absorbing transaction fees that would otherwise settle on L1, which explains part of the sustained pressure on ETH relative to BTC.
What Glamsterdam changes for rollups
The ePBS payload propagation window and the eventual Blob Parameter Only (BPO) forks that follow Glamsterdam are the mechanisms most relevant to L2 economics. Higher blob capacity translates directly into lower data-posting costs for optimistic and ZK rollups, which is the main variable in end-user fees on Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, Scroll, Linea, and Blast.
The upgrade does not reduce L2 fees on activation day. It creates headroom for future blob count increases without renegotiating the fork.
Staking and restaking
Approximately 35.8 million ETH remains staked, close to 29 to 30% of circulating supply. On the restaking side, EigenLayer sits near $19 billion in TVL and holds roughly 93% of the restaking market, with Symbiotic the largest challenger. The April 2026 Kelp incident, which triggered around $5.4 billion in sector-wide withdrawals, has been fully absorbed on the aggregate numbers, though individual LRT flows remain volatile.
For allocators, the near-term calendar is clear: watch client releases for Holesky and Hoodi fork dates, monitor blob usage on the top three rollups, and track ETH ETF net flows for evidence that the wait-and-see posture visible at the start of August has shifted.