Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade launches on Sepolia testnet

Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade has been deployed on the Sepolia testnet, marking a significant step in its pre-mainnet activation sequence. The launch occurred on Tuesday at 1:53 pm UTC, as confirmed by Ethereum community contributor Pooja Ranjan.

This upgrade is designed to advance Ethereum’s layer-1 scaling objectives. It includes enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), block-level access lists, and modifications to gas pricing to better reflect execution costs, according to an Ethereum Foundation announcement.

This testnet deployment is among the final stages for Glamsterdam, which is anticipated to be a pivotal upgrade in 2026. It aims to enhance the network's scalability and overall efficiency. Following this testnet launch, developers will determine the activation timeline for Glamsterdam on the Hoodi testnet, which will precede the final mainnet launch date.

This upgrade follows Fusaka and is intended to improve scalability, strengthen the layer-1, and simplify network usage. After Glamsterdam’s mainnet activation, Ethereum developers plan to proceed with Hegotá as the subsequent major upgrade. In August, developers began evaluating 66 proposals for Hegotá, with several focusing on integrating enhanced privacy features into the protocol.

The primary enhancements in Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade are EIP-7732, which enacts enshrined proposer-builder separation, and EIP-7928, which introduces enforced block-level access lists. EIP-7732 separates block proposers from builders within Ethereum’s consensus protocol and also distinguishes consensus validation from execution validation, allowing validators more time for execution payload validation.

This is a move towards parallel processing, enabling higher transaction throughput and larger block sizes without increasing the gas limit, departing from the current single-lane transaction processing. EIP-7928’s block-level access lists will record accounts and storage locations accessed during a block, alongside post-transaction state changes.

These lists facilitate parallel state reading from disk, parallel transaction validation, and more efficient state root computation. The Ethereum Foundation indicated in May that Glamsterdam would establish a 200 million gas limit floor, a substantial increase from the current approximately 60 million, expected to significantly boost network speed post-upgrade.