Ethereum Foundation Announces Glamsterdam Network Upgrade Scheduled for October 6 at 13:53:36 UTC on Sepolia Testnet
Glamsterdam will launch on Sepolia on October 6
The Ethereum Foundation announced that the Glamsterdam network upgrade is scheduled to activate on the Sepolia testnet at 13:53:36 UTC on October 6, corresponding to epoch 353,024 and slot 11,296,768. The timing for Hoodi on the mainnet has not yet been finalized.
This upgrade merges the execution layer Amsterdam with the consensus layer Gloas, following Fusaka. The core of the upgrade is to separate the proposer-builder roles in the protocol (ePBS, EIP-7732) and to implement block-level access lists (BALs, EIP-7928). ePBS allows proposers to include commitments from builders on execution payloads before builders reveal the payloads, reducing reliance on middleware relays. BALs enable clients to read state in parallel and validate transactions. EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 adjust gas pricing to make state creation and access costs more realistic, requiring contracts and wallets to be retested. The scope is tracked by meta EIP-7773.
Clients that support the Sepolia fork include consensus layer Lodestar 1.49.0, Prysm 7.2.0, Teku 26.9.1, and execution layer Besu 26.9.0, Erigon 3.7.0, go-ethereum 1.17.6, Nethermind 2.0.0, Reth 2.7.0. Nodes must upgrade both layers of clients before activation. Prysm 7.2.0 will have a default gas limit of 60 million after activation. Mainnet users and ETH holders do not need to take action. The roadmap for the mainnet still points to Q4 2026, with no specific date. October 6 replaces the previously discussed target of September 28.
Developers warn that Sepolia test ETH is nearly free, and builder identities can be discarded, allowing attackers to repeatedly win block auctions and refuse to submit payloads; this risk does not affect mainnet funds. Devnet-11 has completed the transition to Gloas, raising the gas limit from 60 million to 200 million while maintaining finality. The foundation has also opened Platåberget for applications and infrastructure to test new rules in advance. A consensus layer meeting among core developers verbally discussed Hoodi around October 27, but it has not yet been added to the activation table.
Buyers include client teams, validators, and layer two infrastructure, while sellers are the protocol rules themselves. Funds do not migrate on-chain; costs are incurred from node upgrades and application retesting. Beneficiaries are rollups and block builders that require higher throughput and parallel execution, while those under pressure are wallets, indexers with hard-coded gas limits, and contracts that have not adjusted state pricing. The event driver is the locking of the testnet fork schedule, not the mainnet switch.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The Ethereum scaling roadmap has split into two lines after the merge: "data availability" and "execution throughput." Glamsterdam, following Fusaka, focuses on the second line as an internal protocol operation: ePBS integrates the proposer-builder market currently maintained by MEV-Boost into the consensus, while BALs provide a state list for parallel execution within blocks. This is not about issuing a new blob but rather about modifying the block production pipeline. The foundation first locks the Sepolia moment without locking the mainnet, continuing the long-standing testnet ladder: private devnet achieves finality, then moves to public testnet, and only then discusses mainnet epochs.
The capital path lies in the block production market. Today, most value flows through relays to professional builders, with validators only signing headers. Once ePBS writes commitments and reveals into the protocol, the trust rent of relays decreases, and builders must submit payloads on time to the committee, or else the penalty falls on their protocol identity, not the relay contract. Gas repricing shifts the cost of state inflation from all users to the transactions that create and access state. Wallets and indexers must change hard-coded limits; otherwise, they will directly error in a 200 million gas experimental environment. Money is not newly issued but rather flows from the relay middleware and cheap state writes, shifting towards clients that can validate in parallel and applications that can adapt to new pricing.
The analogy is that the merge transferred block production rights from miners to validators, and Cancun/Dencun moved data fees from calldata to blobs. ePBS effectively "nationalizes" the existing PBS market into the protocol, while BALs provide a parallel shopping list for the execution layer. The industry position is in a construction phase of layer one scaling, not in an application layer narrative: the mainnet date remains open, indicating that client interoperability and auction abuse resistance have not yet passed. Layer two still consumes data availability, while layer one this time consumes execution parallelism and builder integration into the protocol.
Structural judgment belongs to technical substitution. The mechanism is that once the market maintained by middleware grows large enough to block finality, the protocol will absorb it. ePBS replaces relay reputation, BALs replace serial replay of all states, and gas repricing replaces the old accounting of "creating state is almost free." Free ETH on the testnet will lead to auction flooding, exposing new attack vectors for protocolized PBS. The mainnet pricing power will only shift from developer meetings to block space itself after Hoodi runs its course.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
As middleware grows, the protocol will absorb it.
Once the testnet date is locked, negotiations for the mainnet date can begin.
The prerequisite for parallel execution is to first write state access as a list.