Ethereum’s next major upgrade has another date on the calendar, though it is not a mainnet launch. Developers have scheduled Glamsterdam to activate on the Hoodi test network on October 26, a further step in testing changes to how Ethereum produces blocks and accounts for execution costs.
TL;DR: Glamsterdam is scheduled for Hoodi at 17:42:48 UTC on October 26. The testnet‘s gas limit will rise to 200 million at the same point, but Ethereum has not announced a mainnet activation date.
The Ethereum Foundation says the upgrade will activate at Hoodi epoch 132,352, slot 4,235,264. It follows the upgrade’s October 6 activation on Sepolia, giving developers another environment to check software compatibility before choosing a date for the main chain.
Two changes sit at the heart of Glamsterdam. Enshrined proposer-builder separation, or ePBS, moves the relationship between block proposers and builders into Ethereum’s protocol instead of relying as heavily on outside arrangements. Block-level access lists are intended to make it easier for clients to process and validate parts of a block in parallel.
The upgrade also changes gas accounting, including how Ethereum charges for state creation and access. That matters to application developers whose contracts or tools rely on fixed assumptions about gas costs. Validators and node operators on Hoodi, meanwhile, will need compatible execution and consensus clients before the activation.
A 200-million gas limit on a test network is an important engineering milestone, not a promise that mainnet capacity will instantly quadruple. The Hoodi exercise will help determine whether the planned changes behave as expected under real operating conditions. Mainnet users have no action to take yet.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.