Looking back to the beginning of the year, we had ambitious goals for Besu, and we packed a lot into 2025 - including shipping 3 hardforks (2 named hardforks plus BPO1), 15 releases, 811 commits - oh and Ethereum’s 10-Year Anniversary. This post will unpack some of Besu’s 2025 highlights.
One of the important pillars of Besu is to be a strong mainnet execution layer (EL) client.
Pectra hardfork went live on Ethereum Mainnet in May 2025, delivering blob scaling and account abstraction. Fusaka dropped in December 2025, delivering PeerDAS and (more) blob scaling. 2025 also brought the first of several BPO (Blob Parameter Only) forks that enable more frequent blob scaling increases.
Glamsterdam is next up for 2026, so development and planning is already underway. Headliner EIPs are Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation (ePBS) on the CL side, and Block Level Access Lists (BALs) on the EL side.
BALs record all accounts and storage locations accessed during block execution, enabling more parallelization of reads, validation, and execution.
Besu is leading the way with the Block Level Access List (BALs) implementation thanks to our Bonsai / parallel transaction advantage.
A name has been chosen, and planning has begun for Hegota, which will follow Glamsterdam.
Performance was a major focus area during 2025, and Besu has made significant improvements in performance, including:
Dive into Boosting Besu Performance for an in-depth look at the specific Besu improvements that enabled this unlock, although we’ll revisit some of the highlights here.
At the beginning of 2025, the Ethereum mainnet block gas limit was 30 million gas per block. Fast forward to the year's end, and that limit had doubled to an astounding 60 million! This represents a huge effort from all ELs, working together to contribute to benchmarking, improving and repricing. This report from Nethermind shows Besu is competitive on mainnet performance compared with other ELs.
The main improvements in Besu to unlock the gas limit increase were in the EVM code, as illustrated by the below table.
Table showing Opcodes and Precompiles improvements:
A 60 million block gas limit is a fine achievement, but it is not the final destination. Besu along with the other EL clients will continue working towards the next gas limit increase.
Besu made some great strides in reducing sync time and resource usage, and we covered some specific sync improvements in Boosting Besu Performance. Drop us a message on Discord to let us know if you want a deeper dive into sync related improvements; there is a lot we could share.
Solo stakers benefit from everything that has been delivered with Pectra and Fusaka, as well as performance improvements. History Expiry was another huge improvement delivered in 2025, enabling node operators to prune pre-merge data and free up disk space.
History Expiry brings significant disk savings for node operators running SNAP sync. There are now several options to significantly reduce disk usage by pruning pre-merge (PoW) block data.
If you are running FULL sync, you can also import pre-merge block history from ERA1 archive files.
Parallel tx processing became the standard configuration and was enhanced with the algorithm considering storage slots to reduce false positives. Watch this presentation from EthDenver on Transaction Parallelization if you want to relive the moment.
2025 saw growth for public and permissioned networks. Since its inception in 2019, Besu has evolved into a crucial player in both public and permissioned Ethereum networks, offering enterprise-grade capabilities tailored to diverse use cases. Read more about Besu’s Journey: Bringing Ethereum into the Enterprise.
Besu continues to lead in modular architecture, and innovation, securing its position as the premier choice for enterprise Ethereum solutions.
During 2025, the Besu team built and collaborated on bespoke plugins for Fleet Mode, L2s, and Linea. We’ve also made and welcomed additions and refinements to the plugin API design to further empower community-driven plugin creation.
Watch this presentation from EthDenver to get more context on why we think Modularization is the way forward.
To expand Besu support, Consensys has open-sourced the Fleet plugin to power RPC scaling. Read more in this Fleet Plugin blog post or watch this presentation from November’s EthClient Summit, part of DevConnect - or try it out in your stack!
We have published the Besu gradle meta plugin, which addresses the pain point of managing dependencies when packaging Besu with multiple plugins. This gradle plugin is the equivalent of the java-library plugin, enhanced for Besu plugin development. We recommend using this for any new Besu plugins. We encourage developers to join the growing Besu community by contributing plugins for observability, testing, interoperability, L2, zero knowledge frameworks, and we’d love to hear your ideas.
The Sunset plan is a vast effort that is well underway. Some highlights:
Snap Sync Server entered the year in experimental mode, and has been Production-Ready since 25.7.0. Snap Server also now works seamlessly with QBFT so there is no separate configuration required.
We acknowledge that not all Besu nodes are created equal. If you’re running an RPC or high-spec node, you may want to consider these settings for squeezing some performance gains.
Gas limit - the next target Ethereum ELs are working towards is 70 million gas per block. Besu’s performance team is already working on the worst cases that are required to hit this target.
Tuweni rewrite - we’re expecting to see performance gains from this for block processing average cases.
P2P improvements:
Sync improvements:
Bonsai Archive production ready to replace Forest database mode:
On the BFT front, we're ready to move the QBFT empty block period seconds feature out of experimental. We'll also ideally spend some time on maturity work around BFT forks, for example some attributes like block period seconds don't yet support time-based forks from Shanghai onwards. The Besu team is working with research teams on design and discovery for FOCIL and Encrypted mempools.
You can also follow our progress throughout the year on the roadmap.
As we shape the future of Besu, your voice matters. Share your thoughts, questions and feedback on Discord and let us know how we can make Besu even better. Or jump in and join us as a contributor. Together, we’ll create a thriving ecosystem for developers and stakers alike.