Ethereum's Glamsterdam Upgrade Launches on Sepolia Testnet
On Tuesday, September 26, 2023, Ethereum took a significant step forward with the activation of its Glamsterdam upgrade on the Sepolia testnet. This upgrade aims to advance Ethereum’s layer-1 scalability and efficiency by introducing key features such as enshrined proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists, and revised gas pricing mechanisms. Following this deployment, developers will conduct further testing on the Hoodi testnet before finalizing the upgrade’s mainnet launch date.
Glamsterdam Launches on Sepolia as a Key Pre-Mainnet Rehearsal
The Glamsterdam upgrade went live on the Sepolia testnet on September 26, 2023, at 1:53 pm UTC. Ethereum community contributor Pooja Ranjan announced this milestone on X, marking one of the final major preparatory steps before the mainnet rollout.
According to an Ethereum Foundation blog post dated September 28, Glamsterdam’s goal is to advance Ethereum’s layer-1 scaling roadmap by implementing enshrined proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists, and refining gas pricing to more accurately reflect execution costs.
Core Innovations of Glamsterdam: Enhancing Throughput and Efficiency
Following the Fusaka upgrade, Glamsterdam represents the next significant step in strengthening Ethereum’s scalability, robustness, and usability.
Its headline changes center on EIP-7732 — enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) — and EIP-7928 — block-level access lists (BALs). ePBS separates the roles of block proposers and block builders within Ethereum’s consensus protocol, additionally decoupling consensus validation from execution validation to give validators more time to check execution payloads.
Currently, Ethereum processes transactions in a single lane, meaning a sequential order. The move to parallel processing via ePBS is designed to increase transaction throughput and allow for larger block sizes without raising the gas limit.
EIP-7928 introduces enforced block-level access lists that register which accounts and storage items a block accesses, along with post-transaction state changes. These lists enable clients to perform parallel reads from disk, validate transactions simultaneously, and compute state roots more efficiently.
Next Phases and Future Ethereum Upgrades
The Ethereum Foundation also set a minimum gas limit of 200 million for Glamsterdam, significantly boosting network speed compared to the current gas cap of approximately 60 million.
After Glamsterdam activates on mainnet, Ethereum developers will begin focusing on the next major upgrade, Hegotá. Starting in August, the Ethereum team began reviewing 66 different proposals to scope Hegotá, many looking to introduce enhanced privacy features into the protocol.
Why it matters
The Glamsterdam upgrade represents one of the most consequential Ethereum updates slated for 2026, introducing foundational changes aimed at improving network scalability and efficiency. Implementing key features like enshrined proposer-builder separation and block-level access lists is expected to significantly increase throughput and optimize data processing, which is critical to supporting growth in user activity and decentralized applications on Ethereum. The phased testing approach across multiple testnets reflects developers’ commitment to network stability and security, while the roadmap for follow-up upgrades indicates a clear long-term development vision for the protocol.
Prepared from the source material with AI-assisted editing and checked against the supplied facts.
Open original source ↗