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Morning Edition · Tuesday, October 20, 2026Published at 1:39 AM EDT · New York
Ethereum Sets October 26 for Glamsterdam's Final Test Run With a 200 Million Gas Limit as JPMorgan Moves JPM Coin to Mainnet
The upgrade adds proposer-builder separation and block-level access lists to the base layer while every major layer-2 network except World Chain lost value over the past week.
Ethereum's next hard fork, Glamsterdam, will activate on the Hoodi test network on October 26, raising the gas limit to 200 million. No mainnet date has been set yet. Hoodi is the network validators and staking operators use to rehearse upgrades before they reach Ethereum's main network. The fork is scheduled for 17:42:48 UTC at epoch 132,352, following the Sepolia test network fork on October 6.
The upgrade changes both Ethereum's execution layer and its consensus layer. It builds proposer-builder separation directly into the protocol. Currently, that separation between the validator who proposes a block and the specialist who assembles it depends on relays operating outside the protocol. Glamsterdam also adds block-level access lists, which specify in advance which accounts and storage slots a block will touch, letting clients process transactions in parallel. A third change reprices gas for state creation and state access. Reports describe the increase to 200 million as a rise from 60 million, which would roughly triple the computation each block can hold.
The test schedule was announced the same day JPMorgan brought JPM Coin to Ethereum. JPM Coin is a permissioned token representing dollar deposits at the bank. JPMorgan first launched it on Base, Coinbase's layer-2 network, in November 2025. Access remains limited to approved institutional clients through the bank's Kinexys platform. Moving the token to the base layer puts it where most capital already sits. DeFiLlama data show Ethereum holding $49.66 billion of the $89.39 billion locked in decentralized finance (DeFi) across all chains.
Corporate treasuries are also adding to their Ether holdings. BitMine added 12,535 ETH and now reports 6,041,481 ETH, which it puts at about 4.9% of total supply.
The layer-2 networks that Ethereum's earlier roadmap relied on are losing value. L2Beat data show total value secured across layer-2 networks at $47.51 billion. Over seven days, Base fell 2.2%, Arbitrum One fell 3.9% and Starknet fell 17.1%. World Chain was the only network in the top ten that grew, rising 5%.
What this means
Glamsterdam expands the supply of base-layer blockspace, and that affects three groups differently. Institutions such as JPMorgan gain cheaper settlement on the most liquid chain. General-purpose rollups lose part of their advantage, because their main selling point was lower fees than Ethereum's main network offered. Ether holders face an uncertain effect on supply, because cheaper blocks burn less ETH per transaction. The closest precedent is the Dencun upgrade in March 2024, when added blob space cut rollup fees sharply, reduced ETH burn, and pushed net issuance positive. A 200 million gas limit could produce a similar effect on the base layer itself unless demand grows faster than capacity. Most analysts view the gas increase as straightforwardly positive. The cost falls on node operators, who must process a heavier, faster-growing state. Block-level access lists and the state repricing are meant to offset that load, and the Hoodi test is where that offset gets evaluated. The more likely outcome is that Hoodi activates without a finality failure and that core developers set a mainnet date within the following weeks to months. That outcome depends on client teams seeing no consensus splits under the higher limit, and on the new proposer-builder separation design producing no missed or orphaned blocks. A finality incident on Hoodi would disprove this and push the mainnet date out by months, as happened when Holesky's failure in February 2025 delayed the Pectra upgrade.
Part of a tracked trend
Ethereum's Base Layer Reclaims Settlement
As Ethereum raises base-layer capacity through successive forks, institutional settlement and capital will keep migrating from general-purpose layer-2 networks back to mainnet, compressing the value those rollups secure.
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Comments
1Oct 20, 5:39 AM
The 200 million gas limit depends on block level access lists, since parallel transaction processing is what lets clients handle larger blocks without a proportional rise in validation time.