Priya trades on Ethereum a few times a month, mostly small swaps through a DEX, and has no idea that a bot might be watching her transaction sit in the mempool, ready to sandwich it the instant she submits. She isn’t imagining the risk: a single known MEV bot, nicknamed jaredfromsubway.eth, has extracted more than $295 million from traders through exactly that kind of attack. Ethereum’s 2026 protocol roadmap is aimed, in part, at making that bot’s business model obsolete.
Ethereum’s base layer is going through more change in 2026 than at almost any point since the Merge, and it is easy to lose track of which upgrade does what. This is a quick map of the Ethereum protocol roadmap as it actually stands right now: what has shipped, what is in testing, and what is still a proposal.
Glamsterdam: Cheaper Transfers, Starting Soon
The nearest-term item is Glamsterdam, which splits the flat 21,000-gas assumption applied to every ETH transfer for over a decade into two tiers: one for transfers to existing accounts, one for transfers that create a new account. For someone like Priya sending ETH to an address that already exists, that split is expected to lower the gas cost of an ordinary transfer, real cents saved on every send, multiplied across millions of transactions a day. The Ethereum Foundation has already warned that wallets and gas estimators that hardcode the old assumption will break. Read more: Ethereum’s Glamsterdam Upgrade Rewrites a Decade-Old Gas Rule.
Hegota: Closing the Door on Sandwich Bots
Further out sits the 2027 “Hegota” upgrade, which may bundle in EIP-8184 (LUCID), a proposal to encrypt transactions in the mempool until block builders have already committed to including them. That timing gap is exactly what sandwich bots exploit today: they see a pending trade, jump in front of it and behind it, and pocket the difference. Encrypting the mempool doesn’t just close a technical loophole, it takes direct aim at the same extraction that has already cost traders hundreds of millions of dollars. Read more: Ethereum’s New Encryption Plan Could Finally Stop Trading Bots From Front-Running You.
Rollups Riding on the Same Base Layer
Every change to the roadmap ripples out to the rollups built on top of it. Gnosis Chain’s vote to become a ZK-proven rollup inside Ethereum’s new “Economic Zone” design is only possible because Ethereum’s base layer keeps evolving toward supporting exactly this kind of synchronous composability. Read more: Gnosis Chain Votes to Become Ethereum’s First ZK Economic Zone Rollup.
Protocol upgrades are not the only thing maturing this year. Decred and BitBox both shipped patches that closed serious flaws before either was exploited, and Solana pulled off a real-world stress test of a regulated, tokenized bond fund, three reminders that blockchain infrastructure is hardening on multiple fronts at once. Read more: Decred’s CoinShuffle++ patch, BitBox’s firmware patch, and Solana’s tokenized fund pilot.
For someone like Priya, none of these upgrades feels dramatic on its own. Together, they add up to a network where a routine transfer costs a little less and a routine trade is a little less likely to get skimmed by a bot she’ll never see. Cheaper transfers and a closed sandwich-attack window won’t make headlines the way a price rally does, but they are the difference between an upgrade that’s a footnote and one that quietly puts real money back in an ordinary trader’s pocket.
Source: JaredfromSubway.eth’s Sandwich Bot Extracts $295M, KuCoin News