Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade activated on the Sepolia test network on Tuesday at 1:53 p.m. UTC, corresponding to epoch 353,024. The deployment marks one of the final major rehearsals before the upgrade advances to the Hoodi testnet and, ultimately, the Ethereum mainnet.

Glamsterdam forms part of Ethereum’s ongoing layer-1 scaling roadmap. It follows the Fusaka upgrade and is widely viewed as one of the more significant protocol changes scheduled for 2026. The changes target improved scalability, efficiency, and network usability by adjusting how blocks are produced, validated, and executed.

Core Protocol Changes

Two primary Ethereum Improvement Proposals drive the upgrade. EIP-7732 introduces enshrined proposer-builder separation. This formalizes the division between block proposers and builders within the consensus protocol and separates consensus validation from execution validation. The design gives validators additional time to check execution payloads, reducing timing constraints that can constrain block production and verification.

EIP-7928 adds enforced block-level access lists. Each block now records the accounts and storage locations accessed during its execution, together with post-transaction state changes. These explicit lists allow clients to fetch relevant state data from disk in parallel, validate transactions concurrently, and compute state roots more efficiently. The approach replaces reliance on post-hoc inference of state dependencies with block-level declarations of those dependencies.

The upgrade also includes gas pricing adjustments intended to align costs more closely with actual execution requirements. Ethereum Foundation documentation previously set a 200 million gas limit floor for Glamsterdam. That figure represents a substantial increase from the network’s then-prevailing gas limit of approximately 60 million and is expected to support higher throughput once the upgrade reaches mainnet.

Next Steps in the Rollout

Developers will next establish an activation time for the Hoodi test network after reviewing Sepolia performance and stability. Only after Hoodi testing will a mainnet activation date be finalized. The staged sequence continues Ethereum’s established practice of progressive testnet validation before production deployment.

Once Glamsterdam reaches mainnet, attention will shift to Hegotá, the subsequent major upgrade. Developers began scoping Hegotá earlier in the year by reviewing 66 proposals, several of which address additional privacy capabilities within the protocol.

The Sepolia activation positions Glamsterdam as a concrete step toward higher transactions per second and larger block sizes without simply raising the gas limit. Parallel processing capabilities, supported by the new separation of roles and explicit access lists, form the technical foundation for those longer-term throughput goals.