The biggest blockchain upgrades still to come in 2026

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.

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