TL;DR
- Glamsterdam was activated on the Sepolia testnet on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, at 13:53 UTC, as confirmed by Ethereum contributor Pooja Ranjan.
- The upgrade introduces proposer-builder separation, access lists, and changes to gas pricing to improve network efficiency.
- Following Sepolia, developers will determine the activation date on the Hoodi testnet before confirming the launch on Ethereum mainnet.
Ethereum has been progressing with its upgrade roadmap, and Glamsterdam is one of the most significant developments of 2026.
The Ethereum Foundation confirmed through a blog post that the upgrade was activated on the Sepolia testnet on Tuesday, October 6, at 13:53 UTC. Ethereum community contributor Pooja Ranjan announced it in a post on X shortly after the activation.
Glamsterdam on Sepolia: The Penultimate Test Before Mainnet
Sepolia is one of the final testing stages before Glamsterdam reaches the mainnet. According to the roadmap published on Ethereum.org, the next step will be to determine the activation date on the Hoodi testnet, after which the final mainnet launch date will be set. Developers use these stages to identify technical inconsistencies and ensure that the changes work in a coordinated manner across clients.
The two central modifications in Glamsterdam are enshrined proposer-builder separation, known as ePBS or EIP-7732, and block-level access lists, defined in EIP-7928.
The first introduces a formal separation within Ethereum’s consensus protocol between those who propose blocks and those who build them, while also separating consensus validation from execution validation. This allows validators to have more time to process execution payloads.
The Second Piece: Parallel Processing and Gas Without Forced Limits
The second modification records the accounts and storage locations accessed during block execution, along with the state changes resulting from each transaction. This enables clients to read state from disk in parallel, validate transactions simultaneously, and calculate state roots more efficiently. Ethereum currently operates in a single-lane mode, processing transactions in a single sequential order.
In May, the Ethereum Foundation established a floor of 200 million gas for Glamsterdam, a considerable increase from the current limit of approximately 60 million. Once the upgrade is activated on mainnet, the development team will begin working on Hegotá, the next major upgrade, for which 66 proposals had already been reviewed in August, focusing on bringing privacy capabilities to the protocol.
