Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork — tracked under meta-proposal EIP-7773 — has entered its final devnet phase with ten Ethereum Improvement Proposals locked for inclusion. Internal developer targets point to mainnet activation between September and December 2026, making it the network's largest pr...
"We're working on devnets with all the EIPs in them right now. This is the last phase before we work on hardening and then shipping the testnets. There's no fixed timeline, but we've made massive progress." — Parithosh Jayanthi, Core Developer, Ethereum Foundation
Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork — tracked under meta-proposal EIP-7773 — has entered its final devnet phase with ten Ethereum Improvement Proposals locked for inclusion. Internal developer targets point to mainnet activation between September and December 2026, making it the network's largest protocol overhaul since the September 2022 Merge.
The upgrade's two headline changes — Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (EIP-7732) and Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928) — aim to triple the network's gas capacity from approximately 60 million to a 200-million target floor, reduce standard ETH transfer fees by up to 71%, and remove Ethereum's ~90% dependency on third-party relay infrastructure for block construction.
With roughly $213 billion in market capitalization, 32.6% of ETH supply staked across approximately 1.1 million validators, and Layer 2 networks collectively settling billions in daily volume, Glamsterdam represents the execution layer's most consequential repricing since EIP-1559 introduced base fee burning in August 2021.
Glamsterdam packages ten EIPs under the EIP-7773 meta-specification, currently in Draft status. The Soldøgn interop devnet concluded on May 2, 2026, and a stable multi-client devnet has been running since mid-June. According to CoinDesk reporting from June 16, 2026, developers describe the current phase as "the last phase before we work on hardening and then shipping the testnets."
Public testnet deployment on Sepolia and Hoodi (or equivalent) is the next milestone. Historical precedent from prior forks suggests two to four months of public testnet seasoning before mainnet activation. This places the realistic mainnet window between September and December 2026, with an aspirational internal target of late August.
The ten proposals Scheduled for Inclusion as of June 17, 2026:
The headline feature. EIP-7732 formally separates the block proposer role (selecting consensus blocks) from the builder role (assembling execution payloads) at the protocol level. This eliminates the need for MEV-Boost, the off-chain middleware currently used by approximately 90% of validators to outsource block construction to specialized builders via trusted relays.
What changes mechanically: The trustless exchange of a block payload for payment is built directly into the consensus protocol. Proposers commit to a builder's bid on-chain; builders must reveal the block contents within a defined window. A new Payload Timeliness Committee (PTC) verifies that builders reveal contents on time.
Data propagation window: ePBS expands the data propagation window from approximately 2 seconds to roughly 9 seconds. This expansion is what unblocks Ethereum's ability to safely handle larger blocks and more data blobs for Layer 2 networks without increasing orphan rates.
MEV transparency: Under the current MEV-Boost system, the builder-proposer negotiation happens off-chain through private channels. ePBS moves this competition on-chain, making bid prices and builder behavior auditable. The existing MEV-Boost relay setup continues to function — there is no forced migration — but the new ePBS builder market provides a trust-minimized alternative.
Censorship resistance: Home stakers can participate in block construction without relying on a small number of relay operators. Currently, Flashbots' relay alone processes the majority of MEV-Boost blocks, creating a centralization chokepoint. ePBS distributes this function across the validator set.
EIP-7928 introduces Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) — a mechanism allowing blocks to declare in advance which accounts and smart contract storage slots they will access. This acts as a precomputed map for the network.
Parallel execution: Because BALs identify which transactions access disjoint storage, nodes can safely group non-overlapping transactions and execute them in parallel. According to Ethereum Foundation developer Toni Wahrstätter, historical data analysis shows that 60-80% of transactions in a typical block access completely disjoint storage slots.
Performance impact: Parallel disk reads and transaction processing reduce worst-case block validation latency. This directly enables higher throughput: developers project up to 10,000 TPS-equivalent under realistic workloads once the gas limit is raised accordingly.
Client optimization: BALs allow Ethereum clients to preload information more efficiently, making block execution faster and more predictable. This benefits node operators across all hardware tiers.
Glamsterdam does not enforce a specific gas limit. Validators set the limit via standard gas-vote signaling, currently coordinated around 60 million. What Glamsterdam does is remove the technical barriers — slow block validation, propagation bottlenecks — that previously made a higher limit unsafe.
Target: The post-upgrade design target is a 200-million gas floor, representing approximately 3.3x current capacity.
Fee projections: EIP-7904 proposes gas repricing that would reduce certain transaction costs by approximately 78.6%. Separately, EIP-2780 (also in discussion) could reduce standard ETH transfers between existing accounts by up to 71%. These figures are estimates dependent on actual network conditions post-upgrade.
Revenue dynamics: Lower per-transaction fees do not necessarily reduce aggregate validator revenue. If cheaper blockspace catalyzes new application deployment, additional Layer 2 settlements, and higher on-chain activity volume, total fee revenue could expand. The Dencun upgrade's blob introduction in March 2024 demonstrated this dynamic: blob fees initially cratered L2 posting costs but L2 transaction volume grew by orders of magnitude.
Beyond the two headliners, eight supporting EIPs address developer tooling, gas accounting, and protocol hygiene:
EIP-7708 adds native log emissions for ETH transfers and burns — currently invisible to event-monitoring infrastructure. This closes a long-standing developer pain point.
EIP-7954 raises the maximum contract bytecode size from ~24 KiB to 32 KiB, giving developers approximately 33% more code space for complex smart contracts.
EIP-8037 increases the gas cost of state-creation operations, economically discouraging state bloat — a counterbalance to the gas limit increase.
EIP-8024 introduces backward-compatible extended stack manipulation opcodes (SWAPN, DUPN, EXCHANGE), improving EVM execution efficiency.
New duties: Validators will periodically serve on the Payload Timeliness Committee (PTC), verifying that builders reveal block contents within the protocol-defined window. This is a lightweight duty but adds a new responsibility to the validator role.
Hardware requirements: A slight uptick in storage and I/O requirements is expected to handle parallel disk reads from BALs. However, ePBS ensures that even smaller home-staked nodes can compete fairly with professional builders, as the heavy computation shifts to the builder role.
Income model: The builder market moves on-chain, potentially distributing MEV rewards more transparently and equitably. Currently, MEV extraction is opaque and benefits disproportionately accrue to sophisticated builders. With ePBS, proposer auction revenue becomes a protocol-native income stream.
Staking context: Approximately 39 million ETH (32.6% of supply) is staked across ~1.1 million validators, generating roughly $2 billion in annual staking rewards at current prices. US spot ETH ETFs have attracted approximately $11.6 billion in cumulative inflows, with BlackRock's ETHB product offering staking yield within a regulated wrapper.
Glamsterdam expands blob capacity — from current levels to 72 or more blobs per block — directly reducing data-posting costs for rollups including Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and zkSync.
Lower L2 costs: More blob space means cheaper data availability for L2s, translating to lower end-user transaction fees across the rollup ecosystem.
Settlement volume: With L2 networks collectively settling billions in daily volume, cheaper blob posting could accelerate settlement frequency and enable new use cases that were previously uneconomical at higher data costs.
Revenue feedback loop: More blobs at lower per-blob prices can still generate higher total blob fee revenue if L2 usage scales proportionally — a pattern established after Dencun's initial blob deployment.
On July 4, 2026, Vitalik Buterin outlined the "Lean Ethereum" roadmap — a multi-year overhaul series spanning three to four years that he described as rivaling the Merge in scope. Glamsterdam represents the near-term phase of this plan, focused on usability, efficiency, and validator experience improvements.
The subsequent Hegotá upgrade cycle will target quantum resistance and privacy architecture — redesigning cryptography, data storage for rollups, and core protocol features to make private, intermediary-free transactions and quantum-safe components protocol defaults.
Buterin characterized Ethereum's guiding principles as "CROPS" — censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security — signaling the Ethereum Foundation's narrowed technical focus.
Ten EIPs locked. Glamsterdam packages EIP-7732 (ePBS) and EIP-7928 (BALs) alongside eight supporting proposals under meta-EIP-7773, all currently running on multi-client devnets.
Mainnet window: September–December 2026. Public testnet deployment is the next milestone; historical fork cadence suggests two to four months of testnet seasoning before mainnet activation.
3.3x gas capacity target. The 200-million gas limit floor would triple current L1 capacity from ~60 million, enabling projected throughput of up to 10,000 TPS-equivalent.
71–79% fee reductions. Gas repricing and transfer cost optimizations target reductions of up to 71% for standard ETH transfers and 78.6% for select operation types.
MEV infrastructure moves on-chain. ePBS eliminates the ~90% dependency on third-party relays, making builder-proposer negotiation transparent and trust-minimized.
Parallel execution unlocked. BALs enable 60-80% of block transactions to be processed simultaneously based on disjoint storage access patterns.
Glamsterdam addresses structural constraints that have limited Ethereum L1 throughput since the Merge shifted the network to proof-of-stake. The upgrade does not promise a single silver-bullet improvement; rather, it removes multiple bottlenecks simultaneously — block construction centralization, sequential transaction execution, and conservative gas pricing — that collectively suppress the network's theoretical capacity.
The economic significance extends beyond fee reduction. By enshrining proposer-builder separation and enabling parallel execution, Glamsterdam restructures how value is captured and distributed across the validator set. For a network with $213 billion in staked and market capital at stake, these are not cosmetic protocol changes.
Whether the upgrade delivers its projected throughput gains depends on validator coordination around gas-limit voting, builder adoption of ePBS over MEV-Boost, and whether lower fees generate sufficient volume growth to maintain or expand aggregate revenue. Testing cadence over the next two to four months will determine whether the September-December window holds or slips into early 2027.