Ethereum has moved one major step closer to deploying what is widely considered one of the most consequential blockchain upgrades of 2026. The network’s Glamsterdam upgrade has officially gone live on the Sepolia testnet, marking a vital milestone and serving as one of the final full-scale rehearsals before developers greenlight the hard fork for the Ethereum mainnet.
Ethereum community contributor Pooja Ranjan confirmed the successful deployment in a post on X, noting that the Glamsterdam upgrade went live on the Sepolia testnet on Tuesday afternoon at 1:53 pm UTC.
The successful activation on Sepolia kicks off the final phase of testing for an upgrade designed to fundamentally advance Ethereum’s layer-1 scaling roadmap. According to an Ethereum Foundation blog post published in late September, Glamsterdam introduces a suite of core improvements aimed at making the network substantially more scalable, secure, and efficient. Among its headliner features are enshrined proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists, and a significant restructuring of gas pricing to better align with the actual computational costs of execution.
With the Sepolia testnet deployment now complete, core developers will closely monitor the network’s stability and performance. Following this phase, the development community will determine the official activation date for Glamsterdam on the Hoodi testnet. Only after successful testing across these environments will developers lock in a final date for the much-anticipated mainnet launch.
Aiming to Improve Ethereum’s Efficiency and Scalability
Glamsterdam represents the next major protocol evolution following the Fusaka upgrade, which was similarly designed to enhance overall scalability, harden layer-1 security, and streamline the user experience across the decentralized ecosystem.
The defining features of the Glamsterdam upgrade center on enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs). Together, these two mechanisms overhaul how blocks are produced, ordered, and validated on the network, paving the way for significantly higher transaction throughput on the Ethereum mainnet.
Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, formally outlined in EIP-7732, fundamentally alters Ethereum’s consensus protocol. The proposal introduces a structural division between the actors who propose blocks and those who build them. Furthermore, it separates consensus validation from execution validation. By decoupling these processes, the upgrade grants validators significantly more time to thoroughly check execution payloads, thereby reducing centralization pressures and securing the network against potential validator exploits.
Currently, the Ethereum network operates in what developers describe as single-lane mode, processing transactions sequentially in a strict single order. By integrating parallel processing architectures and refining structural constraints, the protocol seeks to drastically increase the number of transactions processed per second while accommodating larger block sizes, all without forcing an unsustainable rise in the base gas limit.
The second core pillar of the upgrade, introduced via EIP-7928, establishes enforced block-level access lists. These lists systematically record all accounts and storage locations accessed over the course of a block, alongside the resulting post-transaction state changes. By having these pre-computed lists available, network clients gain the capability to read state data directly from disk in parallel, validate incoming transactions simultaneously, and compute state roots with unprecedented efficiency.
These architectural enhancements are expected to unlock massive performance gains. In a technical blog post released earlier in May, the Ethereum Foundation revealed that developers had established a substantial 200 million gas limit floor for the Glamsterdam upgrade. This adjustment represents a dramatic leap from the network’s current gas limit, which hovers around 60 million, effectively providing the underlying infrastructure with a massive post-upgrade speed and capacity boost.
Looking beyond the current milestone, Ethereum developers are already casting their gaze toward the future. Once Glamsterdam successfully completes its journey through the testnets and achieves mainnet activation, the core development collective will shift its focus to implementing Hegotá as the next major network upgrade.
The scoping process for Hegotá has already begun. Back in August, Ethereum developers convened to review a comprehensive slate of 66 improvement proposals, whittling them down to a targeted shortlist. Several of these leading proposals are specifically tailored to introduce advanced privacy capabilities directly into the base protocol, ensuring that Ethereum’s long-term roadmap continues to balance scalability, security, and user confidentiality.
