Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade checks into Sepolia, unpacks its bags before the mainnet 🏨

Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade went live on the Sepolia testnet at 1:53 pm UTC on Tuesday, community contributor Pooja Ranjan announced in an X post, marking one of the final major rehearsals before the mainnet activation. The Ethereum Foundation outlined the upgrade's scope in a Sept. 28 blog post, framing it as a key step in the layer-1 scaling roadmap.

Glamsterdam is built around two headline protocol changes: enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists (BALs). EIP-7732 separates block proposers from builders at the consensus layer and splits consensus validation from execution validation, giving validators more time to check execution payloads. EIP-7928 introduces enforced block-level access lists that record the accounts and storage locations touched in a block along with post-transaction state changes, allowing clients to read state from disk in parallel, validate transactions in parallel and compute state roots more efficiently. The upgrade also adjusts gas pricing to better reflect the cost of execution, and follows the Fusaka upgrade on Ethereum's roadmap.

In a May blog post, the Ethereum Foundation set a 200 million gas limit floor for Glamsterdam, a jump from the network's current gas limit of around 60 million. Developers will now determine Glamsterdam's activation date on the Hoodi testnet before finalizing the mainnet launch date. Following the mainnet deployment, work will shift to Hegotá, the next major upgrade; in August, Ethereum developers began reviewing 66 proposals to scope the upgrade, with several aimed at adding privacy capabilities to the protocol.