Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade is scheduled to activate on the Hoodi testnet on October 26 at 17:42:48 UTC, the Ethereum Foundation said in an October 16 notice. The activation is set for epoch 132,352 and slot 4,235,264. Hoodi's gas-limit target will rise to 200 million at the same epoch, making the exercise a significant test of the network's proposed scaling changes. It is a testnet deployment, not a launch on Ethereum's main network, for which no activation date has been set.

A deadline for testnet operators

The Foundation says Hoodi node operators need compatible versions of both their execution-layer and consensus-layer clients before the activation. Validators must also update their beacon node and validator client. A node that does not understand the new rules cannot follow the upgraded test network, so the deadline is operational rather than symbolic. Client-release tables in the announcement list some confirmed versions while leaving others blank; operators should rely on release notes that explicitly confirm support for this Hoodi activation, not assume every recent client build is ready.

Related reporting: Ethereum’s Sepolia Testnet Raises Gas Ceiling Near 200 Million

Hoodi is the next public test stage after Glamsterdam activated on Sepolia on October 6. The Foundation has published the precise Hoodi slot and timestamp so client teams, validators, infrastructure providers and application developers can coordinate testing. CryptoSlate independently reported the deployment details on October 17 and noted that the 200 million figure is a target, not a claim that every block will immediately consume or permit that much gas. The actual network limit adjusts under Ethereum's existing rules and operator settings.

What Glamsterdam is testing

The upgrade brings two central protocol changes together. Enshrined proposer-builder separation, described in EIP-7732, moves more of the relationship between block proposers and builders into Ethereum's consensus rules. Block-level access lists, covered by EIP-7928, record the accounts and storage touched during a block, helping clients process some state work in parallel. The design is intended to support more execution capacity while keeping validation manageable, but results on testnets will determine how the combination behaves in practice.

Glamsterdam also changes gas accounting for operations that create or access blockchain state. Those costs matter to application developers because contracts can contain assumptions about fixed gas stipends, hardcoded limits or the gas left after a call. The Foundation advises teams to test contracts and gas estimation against the new rules. Builder infrastructure and validator tooling have their own compatibility questions, particularly around the new proposer-builder duties.

Why the distinction matters

A higher gas target can provide room for more computation per block, but it does not by itself guarantee lower transaction fees or a fixed increase in throughput. The mix of transactions, demand for block space and clients' ability to process larger blocks will all influence the outcome. Hoodi gives the ecosystem another coordinated environment in which to observe those effects before any mainnet decision.

For ordinary ETH holders and Ethereum mainnet users, the Foundation says no action is required because of this announcement. Mainnet operators likewise have no immediate upgrade instruction from the Hoodi schedule. The next milestones are compatible client releases, the October 26 Hoodi activation and the test results that follow. Until client teams announce a mainnet date, presenting the test as a completed production upgrade would overstate what has happened.

Sources

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