Ethereum has begun one of the last major tests of its Glamsterdam upgrade, deploying the planned changes to the Sepolia testnet before developers set a schedule for the network’s mainnet launch.
The upgrade went live on Sepolia at 1:53 p.m. UTC on Tuesday, according to Cointelegraph, citing an announcement from Ethereum community contributor Pooja Ranjan on X. The Sepolia deployment is a key rehearsal: developers will use the results to determine Glamsterdam’s activation date on the Hoodi testnet and later establish when the upgrade can move to Ethereum’s main network.
What Glamsterdam is designed to change
Glamsterdam is the next major upgrade after Fusaka and is intended to improve Ethereum’s layer-1 efficiency, scalability and usability. Its main technical changes involve how blocks are built, validated and processed.
One of the central features is enshrined proposer-builder separation, or ePBS, introduced through Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-7732. The change separates the roles of block proposers and builders within Ethereum’s consensus protocol. It also separates consensus validation from execution validation, giving validators more time to check execution payloads.
Another major component, EIP-7928, introduces block-level access lists. These lists record the accounts and storage locations used during a block, as well as changes made to the network’s state after transactions are completed. Ethereum clients could then read data from disk, validate transactions and calculate state roots in parallel.
The broader objective is to allow more work to be handled at the same time. Ethereum currently processes transactions in a single order, while parallel processing is intended to support higher transaction throughput and larger blocks without increasing the gas limit. Gas is the unit used to measure the computational work required to process transactions and execute operations on Ethereum.
Gas limit and the path to mainnet
The Ethereum Foundation said in a May blog post that Glamsterdam has a 200 million gas-limit floor. That would represent a substantial increase from the network’s current gas limit of about 60 million, according to the source material, and is described as a potential post-upgrade speed boost.
The Sepolia launch is not the final activation. After this testnet phase, developers are expected to assess the upgrade and set its next activation on Hoodi before choosing a mainnet date. The source material does not give a confirmed date for either Hoodi or Ethereum’s mainnet.
Once Glamsterdam is activated on mainnet, developers are expected to begin work on Hegotá, the next major upgrade. In August, they began reviewing 66 proposals as part of the process for defining Hegotá’s scope, including proposals focused on adding more privacy capabilities to the protocol.
Ethereum market picture
Moneyiar market data at 10:19 a.m. on October 7, 2026, shows Ethereum (ETH) at $2,589.1411704389, down 4.54% over 24 hours and 3.72% over seven days. Shiba Inu was priced at $0.0000054924, with declines of 6.6% over 24 hours and 5.24% over seven days. Uniswap stood at $8.0533524438, down 9.48% over 24 hours and 8.68% over seven days. Moneyiar listed Polygon (MATIC) with the unit shown as دلار but supplied no price.
