Ethereum has inched closer to one of its most transformative milestones of the year as the Glamsterdam upgrade successfully went live on the Sepolia testnet. The deployment marks a critical penultimate rehearsal for core developers and the broader network community before the upgrade eventually transitions to the Ethereum mainnet.
The activation on the Sepolia testnet occurred on Tuesday afternoon at exactly 1:53 pm UTC. The successful launch was promptly communicated to the public by Ethereum community contributor Pooja Ranjan via a post on social media platform X.
As one of the most consequential blockchain upgrades slated for 2026, Glamsterdam is designed to fundamentally advance Ethereum’s layer-1 scaling roadmap. According to details shared by the Ethereum Foundation in a comprehensive blog post, the upgrade introduces several architectural improvements aimed at making the network dramatically more scalable, secure, and economically efficient. Among the core features heading to the network are enshrined proposer-builder separation, innovative block-level access lists, and crucial adjustments to gas pricing designed to reflect execution costs much more accurately.
With the Sepolia testnet milestone now securely in the rearview mirror, developers are turning their attention to the next phases of testing. The core development teams will evaluate the network’s performance under various conditions before determining an official activation date on the Hoodi testnet. Only after successful testing across these environments will the community lock in a definitive deployment date for the Ethereum mainnet.
Aiming to Improve Ethereum’s Efficiency and Scalability
Glamsterdam represents the next logical evolution in Ethereum’s systemic roadmap, arriving on the heels of the Fusaka upgrade. While Fusaka laid critical groundwork for network scalability and hardening the layer-1 foundation while improving general usability, Glamsterdam takes these ambitions a step further by overhauling how blocks are produced, validated, and processed.
At the heart of the upgrade are two headline-grabbing changes: enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs). These two mechanisms work in tandem to fundamentally transform block production and validation, setting the stage for significantly higher throughput on the Ethereum mainnet without sacrificing decentralization.
Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, formally designated as EIP-7732, represents a major structural shift for Ethereum’s consensus protocol. By formally embedding proposer-builder separation directly into the protocol, the upgrade splits the traditional responsibilities of block construction from block proposal. Furthermore, EIP-7732 separates consensus validation from execution validation. This crucial decoupling grants validators significantly more time to thoroughly review and validate execution payloads, enhancing overall network stability and security against sophisticated MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) exploitation.
Currently, the Ethereum network operates primarily in a single-lane mode, processing transactions sequentially in a strict single order. By introducing these advanced architectural changes, the ecosystem aims to facilitate parallel processing capabilities. Parallel processing seeks to enable a much higher volume of transactions per second (TPS) alongside larger block sizes, all without forcing an unsustainable rise in the base gas limit.
Adding to these architectural enhancements is the implementation of EIP-7928, which introduces enforced block-level access lists. These lists systematically record specific accounts and storage locations that are accessed during the lifecycle of a single block, alongside any resulting post-transaction state changes. For client software, these access lists are a game-changer. They allow clients to read state data directly from disk in parallel, validate incoming transactions simultaneously, and compute state roots with unprecedented efficiency.
The performance implications of these changes are expected to be substantial. In a detailed blog post released earlier in May, the Ethereum Foundation outlined its plans to establish a massive 200 million gas limit floor specifically for the Glamsterdam upgrade. This adjustment represents a monumental leap forward for the network, providing a dramatic post-upgrade speed boost compared to Ethereum’s current baseline gas limit, which hovers around 60 million.
Looking beyond the immediate horizon of Glamsterdam, Ethereum developers are already mapping out the network’s long-term future. Following the eventual mainnet activation of Glamsterdam, core contributors and researchers are scheduled to shift their focus toward implementing Hegotán as the next major network upgrade.
The planning phase for Hegotán is already well underway. Back in August, Ethereum developers began reviewing a substantial backlog of 66 distinct improvement proposals. The objective of this ongoing review process is to carefully narrow down the scope of Hegotán, with several prominent proposals specifically targeted at integrating advanced privacy capabilities directly into the core protocol. As the developer community continues to refine these upcoming specifications, the broader ecosystem remains focused on successfully delivering Glamsterdam as the cornerstone of Ethereum’s ongoing scaling evolution.
