Ethereum devs huddled in the Arctic Circle to fix the network. Here’s what to know

Ethereum's core developers have delivered their most significant technical milestone in months, emerging from a week above the Arctic Circle with a credible roadmap to dramatically scale the network's capacity.

Last week, just over 100 core contributors gathered in Longyearbyen, on Norway's Svalbard archipelago — some 78 degrees north, where the sun never sets — for the Soldøgn interop, a week of intensive work on the Glamsterdam network upgrade.

By Friday, the team had locked in a post-Glamsterdam gas limit floor of 200 million, stabilised external block builder implementations, and finalised gas repricing numbers for EIP-8037.

"At their best, interop weeks can compress a month of asynchronous progress into each day," Ethereum Foundation researcher Tim Beiko wrote in a recap shared with developers on Friday.

The breakthrough lands as Ether trades at $2,377, still more than 50% below its August peak of $4,946. However, signs of hope are emerging. Ethereum has jumped 14% over the past month, CoinGecko data shows.

The 200 million gas limit target is notable because it determines how many transactions Ethereum can process per block. The higher the limit, the more activity the network can handle without congestion — and the stronger the case for Ethereum as the backbone of a global financial system.

Beiko billed it as one of the most productive weeks in recent memory for the Ethereum team.

Foundation sells, Bitmine buys

The Ethereum Foundation wasted no time translating…