Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade enters final phase ahead of October testnet

The countdown to one of Ethereum’s most consequential technical overhauls has officially started. According to a recent update from an Ethereum Foundation researcher, the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade is entering its final development phase, with a public testnet trial now just weeks away and a mainnet rollout penciled in for later this year.

Key takeaways

• The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade, featuring EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists), is described as close to its final stage by Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter.
• A Sepolia testnet fork for Glamsterdam is scheduled for October 6, 2026, ahead of a mainnet launch expected in Q4 2026, though no official date has been confirmed.
• Glamsterdam is built around three goals: faster processing through parallelism, faster and simpler syncing via snap v2, and long-term sustainability against database bloat.
• Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin says the fork following next year’s Hegota upgrade could be Ethereum’s last “normal” hard fork, opening the door to recursive STARKs and quantum-safe consensus.
• Separately, improvements to node synchronization and hardware efficiency are already making it easier for individuals to run Ethereum nodes at home.

Ethereum Glamsterdam Upgrade Nears Completion

Glamsterdam is approaching its final development mile, and the people building it say the progress is encouraging. Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, said in a recent post on X that “Glamsterdam with EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) is approaching the final mile, and things look great.” That assessment reflects the state of ongoing devnet testing rather than a finished product, but it signals that the upgrade has moved past its riskiest engineering phases.

Wahrstätter went further, suggesting that Glamsterdam will rank among the largest forks the network has ever undergone. He acknowledged the long development timeline but argued the eventual payoff will justify the wait.

Key Dates for Testnet and Mainnet Launch

Developers now have a concrete date to watch. The Sepolia testnet fork for Glamsterdam is scheduled for October 6, 2026, marking the upgrade’s first real public trial after extensive devnet testing. Sepolia will serve as the proving ground where developers, validators, and infrastructure teams can stress-test the new code before it touches real value.

The mainnet launch, by contrast, remains less defined. Ethereum‘s scalability roadmap points to a Q4 2026 window for the full rollout, but there is no official mainnet date yet. That gap between testnet and mainnet is standard practice for Ethereum upgrades, giving client teams and node operators time to catch bugs before the changes go live across the entire network.

Core Technical Enhancements of Glamsterdam

Underneath the timeline sits a fairly ambitious technical agenda. The upgrade centers on three main objectives: speeding up transaction processing through parallelization, expanding network capacity, and preventing long-term database bloat through sustainability improvements.

Wahrstätter outlined the practical benefits in his post, pointing to a significant throughput increase thanks to parallelism, along with faster and simpler synchronization enabled by snap v2. He also flagged that the design is meant to be future-compatible with zkEVMs, partially stateful nodes, and inclusion lists — features that matter for scalability further down the road.

Two features anchor these gains. ePBS, a headline feature of Glamsterdam, reworks the block validation pipeline to reduce trust assumptions in how blocks get proposed and confirmed. Block-Level Access Lists, meanwhile, are what unlock parallelization on Ethereum, letting transactions that don’t touch the same data process simultaneously instead of one after another.

This matters because throughput has long been one of Ethereum’s central bottlenecks. If parallelism delivers as intended, it could meaningfully change how much activity the base layer can absorb without leaning entirely on rollups.

Node Accessibility Gets an Unexpected Boost

Running a full Ethereum node at home has quietly become far less demanding, and that shift is feeding directly into the network’s broader decentralization goals. Buterin recently confirmed this on X, sharing specifications from his own Geth node: after pruning, it occupied just 461 GiB of storage.

With the EIP-4444 standard now integrated and snap sync improved, syncing a full node takes about 12 hours, and the disk space needed has dropped under 0.5 TB. High-performance workstations that enthusiasts already buy to run large language models locally comfortably exceed these technical requirements, meaning excess computing power built for AI is doubling as infrastructure for independent blockchain verification.

The next hard fork, Glamsterdam, is expected to accelerate base-layer synchronization even further. That dovetails with the same snap v2 improvements Wahrstätter described, reinforcing that faster, lighter nodes are a consistent thread running through Ethereum’s current development priorities.

Ethereum’s Vision Beyond the Hegota Fork

Glamsterdam may be the upgrade grabbing near-term attention, but Buterin’s latest comments suggest Ethereum’s engineers are already looking well past it. In a recent post, the Ethereum cofounder sketched out what comes after the next major fork, framing it as a genuine architectural turning point rather than an incremental update.

“It’s really not just a blockchain anymore. It’s a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography, to enable much more powerful properties,” Buterin wrote on X, describing his attempt to summarize everything planned for Ethereum starting with the fork after Hegota.

Hegota Fork as the Last Traditional Upgrade

Citing Strawman, the document that houses Ethereum’s longer-range draft roadmap, Buterin noted that the Hegota fork, planned for next year, will likely be the network’s last “normal” upgrade — one built with features and technology that would still feel recognizable to someone familiar with Ethereum back in 2015.

That framing carries weight. It suggests Ethereum’s next chapter won’t just add new features on top of the existing base; it will fundamentally change what kind of system Ethereum is under the hood.

Post-Hegota Transition to Advanced Cryptography and Consensus

Everything after Hegota, according to Buterin, will involve recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, and highly optimized consensus algorithms designed to make Ethereum quantum-safe. He pointed to PeerDAS as the starting point of this transformation, noting that Ethereum began shifting from being just a blockchain into something more powerful with that upgrade — and that after Hegota, this transformation becomes the network’s primary storyline.

According to Buterin, the result will be far cheaper, more scalable, and more private high-security computation than what prior technology alone could deliver, amounting to what he calls a cryptographic world computer.

In practice, this positions the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade as a bridge rather than an endpoint. It solves near-term problems — throughput, sync speed, database growth — while the Hegota fork and everything that follows tackle a much bigger question: how Ethereum stays secure and relevant once quantum computing and advanced zero-knowledge cryptography become practical realities rather than research topics.

FAQ

What is the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade?

Glamsterdam is an Ethereum upgrade close to its final stage that aims to increase throughput via parallelism, improve sync speed using snap v2, and enhance sustainability.

When will the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade be tested and launched?

The Sepolia testnet fork for Glamsterdam is scheduled for October 6, 2026, with the mainnet launch expected in Q4 2026 but no official date yet.

What is the significance of the Hegota fork for Ethereum?

The Hegota fork, planned for next year, might be Ethereum’s last traditional fork. Post-Hegota, Ethereum will transition into a hybrid architecture with advanced cryptography and optimized consensus.

What technological advances will Ethereum have after the Hegota fork?

After Hegota, Ethereum will use recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, and highly optimized consensus algorithms to become quantum-safe and deliver cheaper, more scalable, and more private computations.

Article produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the editorial team.