The Ethereum core developer community has announced a temporary halt to upcoming network testing, confirming that the highly anticipated October 26 activation of the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet has been officially postponed. The delay also impacts the network’s scheduled gas-limit increase to 200 million, which was set to take effect alongside the protocol changes at epoch 132,352 and slot 4,235,264. As a result of this development, the previous deployment schedule and client activation instructions for Hoodi have been entirely superseded. Developers, node operators, and staking participants are advised to consult updated guidance channels for the rescheduled timeline.
The Glamsterdam network upgrade represents a major milestone in Ethereum’s Layer 1 scaling roadmap, combining the Amsterdam execution layer upgrade with the Gloas consensus layer upgrade. Following its initial activation on the Sepolia testnet earlier this month on October 6, the upgrade is designed to significantly improve network throughput and efficiency. Its headlining features include enshrined proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists, and comprehensive adjustments to gas pricing that more accurately reflect the true cost of execution and state growth. While testnet deployments are crucial for vetting these changes, an official mainnet activation date has not yet been decided by client teams and will be announced at a later time.
At the core of the Glamsterdam execution layer improvements are structural shifts in how transactions are organized and validated. Enshrined proposer-builder separation, detailed under EIP-7732, brings the operational divide between block proposers and builders directly into Ethereum’s consensus protocol. Under this system, a block proposer includes a builder’s cryptographic commitment to an execution payload, and the builder subsequently reveals that payload. The protocol automatically handles payment mechanics to the proposer, effectively reducing the network’s reliance on trusted third-party middleware for the exchange. Furthermore, this change cleanly separates consensus validation from execution validation, granting validators additional time to process execution payloads safely. A dedicated payload timeliness committee will attest to whether builders reveal their payloads and corresponding blob data on time, requiring validator operators and builder infrastructure teams to review the updated duties prior to eventual deployment.
Complementing proposer-builder separation, EIP-7928 introduces enforced block-level access lists. These lists systematically record the specific accounts and storage locations accessed during the lifecycle of a block, alongside post-transaction state changes. By providing this deterministic visibility, client software can read state data from disk in parallel, validate transactions simultaneously, and compute state roots with greater computational efficiency. Together, these two foundational pillars provide the architectural groundwork necessary to expand Ethereum’s execution capacity while ensuring that block validation remains practically feasible for everyday node operators running standard hardware.
Glamsterdam also introduces critical changes to gas accounting to better reflect real-world resource consumption and mitigate long-term state bloat. EIP-8037 increases and separately meters the financial and computational cost associated with creating new state, while EIP-8038 updates general state-access costs. Additional refinements cover intrinsic transaction gas, calldata processing, access lists, and broader block gas accounting metrics. Application developers have been strongly encouraged to test their smart contracts and gas estimation logic against these new rules. Smart contracts that rely on fixed gas stipends, hardcoded gas limits, or outdated assumptions regarding remaining gas may require modification to function correctly post-upgrade.
Beyond core scaling mechanics, the upgrade delivers several developer and validator enhancements, including dedicated Ethereum transfer logs, a new slot-number opcode, an increased maximum contract size limit, a deterministic factory contract, and advanced stack-manipulation instructions. Consensus layer adjustments incorporate forward-compatible data structures, mechanisms to exclude slashed validators from the proposal queue, and increased exit and consolidation churn rates to improve validator set fluidity. Security remains a paramount focus for the developer community, with the Ethereum Bug Bounty Program actively covering Glamsterdam specifications and associated EIPs. Client implementations become eligible for bug bounty rewards as soon as their respective software releases are formally integrated into the testing infrastructure.
While the Hoodi testnet activation has been temporarily put on hold, the previously established deployment sequence saw Sepolia successfully integrate Glamsterdam at epoch 353,024 and slot 11,296,768 on October 6, 2026. The upcoming Hoodi deployment, once rescheduled, will similarly introduce a raised gas limit of 200 million via the designated gas limit schedule, mirroring the parameters tested on Sepolia. Once new client releases are thoroughly vetted and confirmed to support the updated Hoodi activation parameters, node operators across the ecosystem will be required to update both their execution layer and consensus layer clients well before the new launch window. Non-staking node operators, active stakers running validator hardware, and application developers should closely monitor official channels for revised timelines, ensuring their infrastructure remains fully synchronized with the evolving Ethereum testnet environment.
Comments (0)