$ETH The Glamsterdam upgrade—anchored by EIP-7928—introduces structural changes to how the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) processes transactions, drastically altering parallel execution capability and Layer 1 gas dynamics.
1. Enabling Deterministic Parallel Execution
Historically, Ethereum nodes executed transactions sequentially (one by one). Node execution could not safely process transactions in parallel because it was impossible to know beforehand if two separate transactions would attempt to read or modify the exact same storage slot or contract state.
EIP-7928 solves this by introducing Block-Level Access Lists (BALs):
Pre-declared State Mapping: A block builder constructs and attaches an enforced BAL to the block header. This list maps out every account address, contract code, and storage slot that will be accessed or updated by each transaction within that block.
Conflict Detection at a Glance: Because nodes receive this explicit, verified map upfront, they can instantly identify which transactions are disjoint (accessing non-overlapping state).
Multi-threaded EVM: Transactions without state conflicts run concurrently across separate CPU cores. Instead of a single-threaded queue, execution becomes multi-threaded, allowing nodes to process transactions concurrently before merging the post-state diffs into a unified state root.
2. Impact on Layer 1 Gas Fees
EIP-7928 and parallelization alter gas fees in two key ways: structural baseline costs and overall transaction throughput.
A. Gas Limit Scaling & Reduced Baseline Gas
Higher Block Gas Limits: Sequential execution creates a sharp hardware bottleneck (CPU time spent on EVM execution). By introducing parallel IO and execution, node processing times improve by 30% or more. This extra headroom allows developers to safely raise the global block gas limit (from 36M–45M up toward 60M+) without overloading node operators.
Lower Gas Spikes: Expanding total available block space relieves congestion on Layer 1. This keeps EIP-1559 base fees lower and more stable during high-demand events like NFT drops or.$BTC #BTC☀ #Binance
