Ethereum has cleared another critical milestone on its path toward enhanced scalability and efficiency. The highly anticipated Glamsterdam upgrade has officially gone live on the Sepolia testnet, marking one of the final major rehearsals before developers deploy the network-altering update to the Ethereum mainnet.
Ethereum community contributor Pooja Ranjan confirmed the deployment in a public post on X, noting that the upgrade successfully activated on the Sepolia network on Tuesday afternoon at 1:53 pm UTC. The rollout represents a major step forward in Ethereum’s ongoing layer-1 scaling roadmap, bringing the ecosystem significantly closer to realizing the core architectural improvements outlined by core developers earlier in the year.
According to technical specifications released by the Ethereum Foundation, the Glamsterdam upgrade is designed to fundamentally overhaul how the network handles data throughput, execution costs, and transaction validation. The core pillars of the upgrade include enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), block-level access lists (BALs), and targeted modifications to gas pricing structures intended to better reflect the true computational cost of transaction execution on the network.
As one of the most consequential blockchain upgrades scheduled for 2026, Glamsterdam follows hot on the heels of the Fusaka upgrade, which was similarly focused on hardening layer-1 security, improving user experience, and optimizing base-layer scalability. With the Sepolia testnet deployment now successfully underway, developers will closely monitor the network’s stability before scheduling Glamsterdam’s subsequent activation on the Hoodi testnet. Once that phase is successfully completed and evaluated, core developers will lock in the final timeline for the mainnet launch.
Aiming to Improve Ethereum’s Efficiency and Scalability
The overarching goal of the Glamsterdam upgrade is to push Ethereum past its historical performance bottlenecks, transforming the base layer into a significantly more robust engine for decentralized applications and institutional adoption. Currently, the network often operates in a sequential single-lane mode, processing transactions in a rigid, single order. Glamsterdam introduces structural upgrades that lay the groundwork for more advanced parallel processing capabilities, aiming to drive up transactions per second and increase block sizes without imposing prohibitive demands on the network’s overall gas limit.
The headliner changes steering this architectural shift are enshrined proposer-builder separation and block-level access lists. Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, formally designated as EIP-7732, fundamentally alters Ethereum’s consensus protocol. By cleanly separating block proposers from block builders—and decoupling consensus validation from execution validation—the upgrade gives validators substantially more time to thoroughly review execution payloads. This decoupling is designed to mitigate centralization pressures among block builders while fortifying the network against various forms of sequencer manipulation.
The second major mechanism, enforced block-level access lists introduced via EIP-7928, addresses data retrieval and state management inefficiencies. These access lists systematically record every account and storage location accessed during the lifecycle of a block, alongside the corresponding post-transaction state changes. By having these lists pre-computed and enforced, network clients gain the ability to read state data from disk in parallel, validate transactions simultaneously, and compute state roots with a fraction of the previous computational overhead.
These systemic improvements are expected to unlock massive performance gains. In a technical blog post published earlier this year, the Ethereum Foundation outlined its plan to establish a substantial 200 million gas limit floor for the Glamsterdam upgrade. This adjustment represents a dramatic leap from the network’s current gas limit baseline of approximately 60 million, effectively providing the Ethereum mainnet with an immediate post-upgrade speed and capacity boost.
Even as developers shepherd Glamsterdam through its final testnet phases, the roadmap for the Ethereum protocol continues to push forward. Following the eventual mainnet activation of Glamsterdam, core protocol engineers are already preparing to shift their focus toward Hegotá as the subsequent major network-wide upgrade. Discussions and scoping sessions for Hegotá began earlier in the year, with developers reviewing dozens of distinct improvement proposals aimed at expanding the network’s capabilities, including introducing advanced privacy features directly into the protocol layer.
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