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Ethereum’s next hard fork has quietly moved into its final pre-launch stretch. Developers are now testing all planned upgrades for Glamsterdam across multi-client devnets, the last major checkpoint before the upgrade hits public testnets.
That process, which kicked off at the Soldøgn interoperability event in early May 2026, has produced stable multi-client devnets. The wrapping of enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) testing was largely complete by the end of May.
What Glamsterdam actually changes
The upgrade carries two headline features. The first is ePBS, tracked as EIP-7732, which bakes proposer-builder separation directly into the protocol rather than relying on out-of-protocol solutions like MEV-Boost. Right now, the system that decides which transactions go into a block and in what order depends on third-party relay infrastructure. Glamsterdam moves that logic on-chain, reducing trust assumptions and making the block production pipeline more transparent.
The second marquee change is EIP-7928, which introduces block-level access lists. These allow blocks to declare upfront which parts of Ethereum’s state they intend to touch, laying the groundwork for parallel execution, where multiple transactions can be processed simultaneously instead of one by one. The upgrade doesn’t flip on full parallel execution itself, but it builds the scaffolding.
Beyond those two, a handful of supporting EIPs round out the package. EIP-8037 targets gas repricing measures designed to support higher gas limits without creating new attack vectors. Additional proposals under development include EIP-7778, EIP-7843, EIP-7976, EIP-7981, and EIP-8024, each addressing various aspects of state management and transaction processing.
The upgrade is explicitly designed to improve Layer 1 scalability without demanding additional hardware from node operators, preserving accessibility for home stakers running nodes on consumer-grade machines.
The road from Dencun to Glamsterdam
The Dencun fork landed in 2024, introducing proto-danksharding (EIP-4844) and dramatically reducing costs for Layer 2 rollups. Fusaka followed in late 2025. Glamsterdam picks up where Fusaka left off, shifting the focus from rollup-centric scaling back toward Layer 1 throughput.
The name follows Ethereum’s naming convention of combining a star name with a city. In this case, Gloas (the star) meets Amsterdam (the city).
The Soldøgn interop event in May 2026 gathered client teams, including Geth, Nethermind, Besu, and Erigon, along with their consensus-layer counterparts, to resolve compatibility issues in real time. Stable multi-client devnets emerged from Soldøgn. Public testnet deployment across Holesky and Sepolia is the next milestone before any mainnet activation date is set. The current target window is the second half of 2026.
What this means for investors and the broader ecosystem
The ePBS component is notable for anyone watching Ethereum’s MEV dynamics. Currently, the MEV supply chain runs through external relays and builders operating outside the protocol’s direct oversight. Enshrining PBS into the protocol changes the power dynamics, potentially reducing the influence of dominant relay operators and making block construction more competitive.
Block-level access lists via EIP-7928 lay concrete groundwork for parallel execution on Layer 1. Competitors including Solana, Monad, and Sei have already built parallelism into their architectures.
Gas repricing via EIP-8037 is a variable worth tracking. Higher gas limits mean more transactions per block, but repricing specific opcodes incorrectly could open denial-of-service vectors or inadvertently break existing smart contracts that rely on current gas assumptions.
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