Ethereum Foundation Schedules Glamsterdam Upgrade for Hoodi Testnet After October 6 Sepolia Activation

The upgrade writes proposer-builder separation into the protocol and adds block-level access lists for parallel execution, which would reduce the role of the trusted relays that today route most Ethereum blocks.

The Ethereum Foundation announced on October 16 that the Glamsterdam network upgrade is now scheduled for the Hoodi testnet. The upgrade activated on Sepolia on October 6. Hoodi is the last public rehearsal before core developers set a mainnet date. The foundation describes Glamsterdam as the next step in Ethereum's layer-1 scaling roadmap.

The upgrade makes three changes. The first is enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), specified in Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 7732. It moves the handoff between the validator who proposes a block and the specialist who builds it into the protocol itself. Today that handoff depends on off-chain relays. investingLive reports that such relays carry around 88% of blocks, and validators have to trust them to pay and to release block contents honestly.

The second change is block-level access lists (EIP-7928). A block declares in advance which accounts and storage slots its transactions touch, so clients can execute those transactions in parallel. The same report says this opens a path to raise the gas limit from about 60 million toward 200 million. The third change revises gas pricing so that fees track the real resource cost of operations more closely.

The decentralization effect is concrete. Under the relay model, a small set of operators can censor or delay blocks, and those operators sit outside protocol rules. ePBS removes that dependency for the payment guarantee. Builder concentration remains, because ePBS changes who validators must trust but does not change how many firms can compete to build profitable blocks.

What this means

Glamsterdam moves value along two channels. ePBS weakens the commercial position of relay operators and shifts trust from private companies to protocol rules. Block-level access lists raise layer-1 capacity, which competes directly with general-purpose layer-2 networks for the same users. L2Beat data show that most large rollups lost value secured over the past week (Arbitrum One down 4.6%, Base down 0.4%), so they face a cheaper base layer from a weaker position. The market has already priced in Sepolia's successful activation and an expected 2027 mainnet launch. What it has not fully priced is how a gas limit in the hundreds of millions would reduce demand for rollups that offer only cheaper execution. The Dencun upgrade offers a useful precedent. After blob data launched in March 2024, rollup fees fell sharply, and much of that value went to users rather than to rollup token holders. The likelier outcome is that Hoodi activates without a consensus failure and core developers set a mainnet date within weeks to a few months. Rollups would then push toward specialization in privacy, high-frequency trading or app-specific chains. This forecast would be wrong if Hoodi shows a client split or an ePBS liveness bug that forces developers to separate the access-list and pricing changes from ePBS.

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