Key points

  • Glamsterdam activated on Sepolia on October 6 at epoch 353,024 and the public testnet’s block gas ceiling has risen from about 60 million to nearly 200 million.
  • Early sampled blocks used less than half of the available allowance, so the test has not yet demonstrated sustained performance at full capacity.
  • Ethereum mainnet remains at 60 million gas per block and has no scheduled Glamsterdam activation date.

A public test replaces the private rehearsal

Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade has activated on the public Sepolia testnet, moving the scaling work beyond the controlled development-network rehearsal previously covered by The Token Press. Ethereum Foundation records place the fork at epoch 353,024 on October 6 at 13:53:36 UTC. By October 8, Sepolia blocks were carrying a gas limit near 200 million, up from roughly 60 million before the activation. Gas measures computational work, so the limit sets the maximum processing budget available to each block. Sepolia uses valueless test tokens and lets client teams observe the new rules in a public environment before any mainnet decision.

The larger ceiling still has limited stress evidence

A higher gas ceiling creates room for more payments, trades and smart-contract calls when demand is strong, but it does not guarantee a proportional increase in transactions. Glamsterdam changes the cost of several operations, and transaction workloads differ in complexity. CoinDesk reviewed more than 25 consecutive Sepolia blocks and found they consumed about 52 million to 92 million gas, or 26% to 46% of the available allowance. Decrypt separately examined 25 blocks that used roughly 47.1 million to 85.9 million gas. Those samples confirm the new ceiling is active, but none approached full capacity, where hardware, networking and validation demands would be most revealing.

Related reporting: Ethereum Glamsterdam devnet clears high-capacity rehearsal

Block access lists prepare parallel processing

One of Glamsterdam’s central changes is EIP-7928, which adds enforced block-level access lists. The lists identify the accounts and storage locations a block will touch and include post-transaction state changes. Ethereum’s roadmap says clients can use that information to read unrelated data from disk in parallel, validate independent transactions concurrently and compute state roots more efficiently. The design is intended to reduce sequential bottlenecks as block capacity grows. It also changes assumptions for client developers, who must verify that implementations remain consistent when different parts of a block are processed at the same time.

Block building moves into the protocol

Glamsterdam also introduces enshrined proposer-builder separation through EIP-7732. The mechanism puts the exchange between block builders and proposers into Ethereum’s consensus rules rather than relying entirely on outside middleware. A proposer includes a builder commitment, the builder later reveals the execution payload, and a committee checks whether the payload and related data arrived on time. Separating consensus validation from execution validation gives validators more time to check larger payloads. Validator operators and builder-infrastructure providers therefore face new duties and interfaces, not only a higher processing limit.

Capacity and state growth remain linked

Bigger blocks can increase demands on the machines that store and verify Ethereum’s state. The official roadmap pairs higher capacity with revised charges for creating and accessing permanent data, aiming to make costs better reflect the long-term burden on nodes. That trade-off matters for decentralization: if ordinary operators cannot keep up with disk, memory or bandwidth requirements, validation could concentrate among larger providers. The current Sepolia phase gives developers a chance to measure those effects across multiple client combinations and operating environments rather than relying only on laboratory benchmarks.

Mainnet remains unchanged

The Sepolia activation is a test milestone, not a mainnet launch. Ethereum’s official deployment table lists no activation date for Hoodi or mainnet, and mainnet’s gas limit remains 60 million. Any wider rollout will depend on public-test stability, client fixes and a separate scheduling decision by Ethereum developers. The immediate significance is narrower but concrete: Glamsterdam’s new block-building and data-access rules are now operating on a public network with a processing ceiling more than three times the mainnet level. Evidence from fuller blocks and longer observation will determine whether that headroom can be used safely.

Sources

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