TL;DR
- Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade has cleared another important testing phase as developers prepare for a proposed October 6 Sepolia deployment.
- The latest devnet raised the block gas limit from 60 million toward 200 million, while Nethermind completed 2,302 performance tests.
- The upgrade also introduces block-level access lists and in-protocol proposer-builder separation, creating a foundation for higher throughput and more efficient Ethereum block processing.
Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade is moving through testing with a major increase in potential block capacity. The latest rehearsal successfully produced blocks under the new construction rules, bringing the network closer to a public test on Sepolia that developers currently target for October 6.
The devnet increased its block gas limit from 60 million to 200 million. Gas represents the computational work required to process transactions, so a higher limit gives Ethereum more room to accommodate activity within each block. The 200 million setting remains a testing parameter rather than a confirmed mainnet configuration.
Nethermind also completed 2,302 performance tests while processing 570.7 billion gas in three minutes and 15 seconds. The benchmark reached an average of roughly 2.9 billion gas per second, although it measured Nethermind’s execution software rather than the performance of the entire Ethereum network.
Glamsterdam Targets Parallel Processing And Higher Throughput
One of the upgrade’s central components is Block-Level Access Lists, or BALs, included through EIP-7928. These lists provide validators with information about which accounts and pieces of Ethereum’s state a block will access before execution begins. That advance information can improve execution efficiency as the network handles larger workloads.
That information can reduce the need to process transactions strictly one after another. Validators can identify transactions that do not depend on the same state and prepare data in parallel, potentially improving Ethereum’s ability to process more activity without requiring every operation to follow a sequential path.
Glamsterdam also includes enshrined proposer-builder separation through EIP-7732. The mechanism moves the relationship between block builders and proposers into Ethereum’s protocol rather than relying entirely on external middleware. Ethereum says the design can expand the time available for block data propagation from roughly two seconds to about nine seconds.
Ethereum Prepares For The Next Scaling Phase
The capacity push fits Ethereum’s broader 2026 development strategy. The Ethereum Foundation has identified higher execution capacity and greater data availability as connected priorities, with Glamsterdam combining several changes aimed at supporting that expansion.
The proposed October 6 Sepolia fork would give developers another public environment to test applications and infrastructure against the new rules. Ethereum’s official roadmap currently lists Glamsterdam as targeting mainnet during Q4 2026, although no mainnet date has been confirmed.
For Ethereum, Glamsterdam goes beyond simply increasing the gas limit. By improving how blocks are assembled, propagated and executed, the upgrade is designed to give the network more room to scale while keeping the underlying infrastructure manageable for validators.
