Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade nears first public test
Ethereum's Glamsterdam fork is close to its final stretch, with a Sepolia test set for October 2026 and mainnet expected in the fourth quarter, according to U.Today.
Key points
- Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter said Glamsterdam and EIP-7928 are close to the final mile
- The Sepolia fork is scheduled for October 6, 2026, with mainnet expected in Q4 2026 and no official date yet
- Glamsterdam aims to speed up processing, expand capacity and prevent database bloat
- ePBS revamps the block validation pipeline, while block-level access lists bring parallelisation
- Vitalik Buterin said the fork after Hegota may be Ethereum's last normal fork, with later work focused on quantum safety
Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade is approaching its final stretch, with testing continuing on devnets ahead of its first public test, U.Today reports. Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter said in a recent post on X that Glamsterdam and EIP-7928, known as Block-Level Access Lists, are close to the final mile and that things look great.
The Glamsterdam upgrade is intended to pave the way for the next generation of scaling on Ethereum. According to U.Today, it centres on three main goals: speeding up processing through parallelisation, expanding capacity, and preventing database bloat to keep the network sustainable.
Glamsterdam nears final mile
The article states that the countdown has begun for Glamsterdam's first public test. The Sepolia fork is scheduled for October 6, 2026, while the mainnet launch is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, with no official date announced yet.
Wahrstätter said Glamsterdam will be one of the biggest forks seen yet. He acknowledged that it has taken a correspondingly long time to deliver, but claimed the result will be worth it, according to U.Today.
Key dates and features
Two features stand out in the upgrade. ePBS is described as a headliner that revamps the block validation pipeline and reduces trust assumptions, while Block-Level Access Lists bring parallelisation to Ethereum. Wahrstätter also cited a significant throughput increase, faster and simpler sync through snap v2, and future compatibility with zkEVMs, partially stateful nodes and inclusion lists.
Separately, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin shared a glimpse of a post-Hegota era for the network. In a post on X, he described Ethereum as no longer just a blockchain but a hybrid architecture combining blockchains and modern cryptography to enable more powerful properties.
Buterin on post-Hegota era
Citing Strawman, which holds the longer-range draft roadmap for Ethereum, Buterin noted that Hegota, the fork planned for next year, may be Ethereum's last normal fork, with features recognisable to someone from 2015. Everything after it will involve recursive STARKs, automated formal verification and highly optimised consensus algorithms to make Ethereum quantum-safe.
Buterin said that with PeerDAS, Ethereum began its transition from being just a blockchain to something more powerful, and that after Hegota this transformation becomes the network's primary story. The outcome, he said, will be cheaper, more scalable and more private high-security computation than the previous era's technology alone could achieve.