Arthur Hayes just bought more Ethereum. Again.

The BitMEX co-founder picked up another 1,500 ETH worth roughly $2.63 million, according to BSCNews on X. This latest purchase lands in a week where Ethereum’s biggest protocol overhaul since the Merge quietly entered its final testing phase.

“BitMEX co founder Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) has recently purchased another 1,500 $ETH worth roughly $2.63 million, per Arkham data.”

As BSCNews noted on X, Hayes has remained one of the most vocal Ethereum supporters in the market. That vocal support now comes with receipts. On-chain tracker Lookonchain flagged a wallet linked to Hayes receiving 3,000 ETH worth $5.42 million from market maker Flowdesk on June 15. Then on June 17, another 1,400 ETH at $2.51 million. Now 1500 more.

Three buys in four days. Over $10 million in fresh ETH exposure.

Something Bigger Than Whale Alerts

The timing here is what the whale trackers keep missing. Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade just reached its final devnet stage this week, locking in ten Ethereum Improvement Proposals under the Meta EIP-7773. Ethereum Foundation developer Parithosh Jayanthi confirmed teams are running devnets with all the EIPs included, calling Glamsterdam “probably the largest fork we’ve had since the Merge.”

Hayes isn’t buying into empty hype. The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade brings two structural changes that could reshape how the network handles throughput entirely. EIP-7732, known as Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation or ePBS, moves block building duties directly into the protocol. That cuts out trusted third-party relays like MEV-Boost. It also stretches the data propagation window from 2 seconds to about 9 seconds.

More room to move data means more capacity for transactions and Layer 2 blobs without stressing validators.

What $10 Million Buys You at $1,750

The second headliner, Block-Level Access Lists through EIP-7928, functions like a dependency map for the entire block. Right now Ethereum processes transactions one by one because validators cannot know which accounts a transaction will touch until it runs. BALs change that. They declare every account and storage slot a block will access before execution starts.

That sets up parallel processing. Multiple transactions running at once instead of standing in a sequential line. For a retail holder stacking ETH at current prices near $1,750, this is the infrastructure that targets a future gas limit of 200 million. The current limit sits around 60 million.

Ethereum’s roadmap page frames the upgrade around three goals. Speeding up processing through parallelization. Expanding capacity by splitting block duties. And preventing database bloat by repricing state creation costs.

Hayes Sold Everything Else First

Context matters here. Hayes didn’t just decide to buy ETH randomly. In his June 8 essay titled “Reality Test,” the Maelstrom chief investment officer disclosed selling positions in Hyperliquid, Near Protocol, Worldcoin, and Zcash. He described those exits as defensive macro de-risking. Bitcoin and Ethereum stayed as core holdings through that entire rotation.

The pattern is clear. Trim altcoin exposure. Keep ETH. Then reload.

His earlier $5.42 million purchase on June 15 came right after the US-Iran peace deal announcement, when risk sentiment improved across global markets. ETH climbed nearly 6% that session. Yet even with the rally, ETH still trades roughly 50% below where some algorithmic models projected it would be by mid-2026.

Gas Gets Cheaper, Storage Gets Honest

Beyond ePBS and BALs, Glamsterdam packs a gas repricing overhaul that few outlets are tracking closely. EIP-2780 proposes cutting the base fee for a simple ETH transfer by up to 71%. A standard payment between existing accounts would reflect only the actual work nodes perform, verifying a signature and updating a balance.

EIP-8037 introduces a fixed cost per state byte targeting 120 GiB per year of database growth. That sounds technical but it matters to anyone running a node at home. State creation fees will finally match the real storage burden those operations place on hardware. Developers testing at a 150 million reference block gas limit are using these parameters to derive accurate pricing.

One proposal buried in the upgrade, EIP-7708, makes ETH transfers and burns automatically emit a log. That fixes a blind spot where regular ETH movements between smart contracts produced no standard receipt. Exchanges, wallets, and bridge operators have been building custom tracking tools to work around that gap for years.

No mainnet activation date exists yet. Client teams need to run Glamsterdam through public testnets on Holesky and Hoodi before setting a slot. Past forks have needed two to four months of testnet testing, which puts mainnet somewhere between September and December 2026.

Hayes appears willing to wait. His June market thesis projected ETH reaching between $10,000 and $20,000 before the current cycle ends. Whether that conviction holds through another quarter of drawdown is a different question. ETH has fallen in Q4 2025, Q1 2026, and is currently down over 18% this quarter.

The upgrade won’t reverse a macro-driven bear market on its own. But when the co-founder of a derivatives exchange keeps buying a network asset while that network quietly rebuilds its entire block production engine, the signal carries weight that raw price charts cannot show.