Ethereum developers entered the final devnet phase of the Glamsterdam hard fork in mid-June 2026, running multi-client testnets with all ten planned Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) active simultaneously. The upgrade — the most structurally significant since the September 2022 Merge — target...
"Probably the largest fork we've had since the Merge. It could change a lot of assumptions about Ethereum and set us up for much more scaling." — Parithosh Jayanthi, DevOps Engineer, Ethereum Foundation
Ethereum developers entered the final devnet phase of the Glamsterdam hard fork in mid-June 2026, running multi-client testnets with all ten planned Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) active simultaneously. The upgrade — the most structurally significant since the September 2022 Merge — targets mainnet activation in Q3 2026, with an internal working date around late August. A 20–30% probability of slippage into Q4 remains, according to developer estimates.
Glamsterdam bundles two headline protocol changes: Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS, EIP-7732) on the consensus layer, and Block-Level Access Lists (BALs, EIP-7928) on the execution layer. Together, they widen the block-propagation window from approximately 2 seconds to 9 seconds, lay the groundwork for raising the block gas limit from 60 million to 200 million, and enable parallel transaction execution. Accompanying gas repricing proposals project up to 71% fee reductions for standard ETH transfers while increasing the cost of state-creation operations to cap database growth at approximately 120 GiB per year.
The upgrade carries direct implications for Ethereum's economic model. With daily L1 fee revenue already down from a peak of roughly $23 million to approximately $6.3 million, and the average gas price sitting at 0.47 gwei (down from 1.67 gwei a year earlier), Glamsterdam accelerates Ethereum's transition from a "gas-selling" platform to a settlement-layer monetizing security and finality rather than per-transaction fees.
The meta-EIP tracking the upgrade, EIP-7773, lists ten proposals as Scheduled for Inclusion as of June 17, 2026. The name blends "Gloas" and "Amsterdam," following Ethereum's convention of combining consensus-layer and execution-layer fork names.
| EIP | Component | Layer | |------|-----------|-------| | EIP-7732 | Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) | Consensus | | EIP-7928 | Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) | Execution | | EIP-8037 | State-creation gas cost increase with dedicated reservoir | Execution | | EIP-8038 | State-access gas cost updates | Execution | | EIP-2780 | Reduced intrinsic transaction gas | Execution | | EIP-7708 | ETH transfer and burn log emissions | Execution | | EIP-7778 | Remove refunds from block-level gas accounting | Execution | | EIP-7843 | SLOTNUM opcode | Execution | | EIP-7954 | Max contract size raised from ~24 KiB to 32 KiB | Execution | | EIP-8024 | Backward-compatible SWAPN, DUPN, EXCHANGE opcodes | Execution |
Supporting networking EIPs — EIP-7975 (eth/70, paginated block receipt lists) and EIP-8159 (eth/71, block access list exchange) — facilitate peer-to-peer distribution of the new data structures. EIP-8045 (exclude slashed validators from proposing) and EIP-8080 (standard exits via consolidation queue) address network resilience.
The current block-production pipeline relies on MEV-Boost, an off-protocol middleware developed by Flashbots. Approximately 90% of Ethereum blocks are built through this system, with roughly 92% of blocks relayed via MEV-Boost relays. The relay market is dominated by a handful of operators: Ultra Sound relay handles 32.3% of MEV-Boost payloads, Titan Relay 24.75%, and bloXroute's two relays a combined 26%, according to late-2025 relay statistics.
This architecture creates several structural issues:
Centralization risk. Five relays control over 90% market share. A coordinated relay failure or censorship policy could disrupt block production network-wide.
Censorship vulnerability. Some relays have excluded transactions interacting with OFAC-sanctioned addresses, undermining Ethereum's neutrality guarantees. The filtering occurs at the relay layer, outside protocol governance.
Execution bottleneck. The current design forces block validation into a roughly 2-second "hot path" window, constraining how much data the network can safely process per block.
EIP-7732 moves the proposer-builder relationship into the protocol itself. Proposers commit to a block header from a builder, then the builder reveals the execution payload in a separate step. This separation widens the data propagation window to approximately 9 seconds, unblocking higher throughput without degrading consensus safety. It also eliminates the need for external relay trust.
A research paper published on arXiv in June 2026 (2506.18189) — a "systematization of knowledge" on ePBS — notes the benefits of "native MEV mitigation mechanisms and reduced validator operation costs," while flagging risks of "multiparty collusion and chain stagnation" as active concerns. The "free option" problem is cited specifically: a winning builder could withhold their payload if market conditions shift during the approximately 8-second revelation window, forfeiting the block reward rather than executing an unfavorable trade.
EIP-7928 requires each block to declare upfront which accounts and storage slots its transactions will touch. This provides a dependency map that allows Ethereum clients to identify non-overlapping transactions and execute them in parallel.
Today, Ethereum processes transactions sequentially — each must complete before the next begins. BALs make execution order predictable and parallelizable where transactions access different state. Clients can preload the relevant data, reducing I/O wait times and enabling multi-threaded execution.
The access lists also serve as a prerequisite for "executionless sync," where new nodes can verify blocks using the access list metadata rather than re-executing every transaction. This is a foundational step toward the Verge phase of Ethereum's roadmap, where zero-knowledge proofs would verify block validity without full re-execution.
Glamsterdam carries a comprehensive restructuring of Ethereum's gas-cost schedule, affecting every on-chain operation.
Compute operations become cheaper. High-level computational opcodes see reduced gas costs, reflecting the reality that modern hardware handles arithmetic and logic operations far more efficiently than when the original gas schedule was set.
State access becomes more expensive. EIP-8037, finalized in May 2026, introduces a fixed cost-per-state-byte with a dedicated gas reservoir for state creation. EIP-8038 updates state-access gas costs to align with actual hardware I/O performance.
Intrinsic transaction gas drops. EIP-2780 reduces the base cost of every Ethereum transaction. Standard ETH transfers between existing accounts could become up to 71% cheaper, according to EIP specification analysis. Across both simple transfers and complex smart contract interactions, fees are projected to decline by approximately 78.6%.
The state-growth controls are economically critical. Under the proposed 200 million gas limit, uncapped state creation would accelerate database bloat. The EIP-8037 reservoir mechanism caps annual state growth at approximately 120 GiB per year. Ethereum's full-node disk requirements already sit at 0.9 to 1.3 TB for the execution client, plus 80–200 GB for the consensus client, growing at roughly 7–8 GiB per week. Without pricing controls, higher throughput would compound this problem.
Glamsterdam does not itself raise the gas limit — validators set this parameter through a signaling mechanism. However, the upgrade's structural changes are designed to make a gas limit of 200 million per block safe and sustainable, more than tripling the current 60 million ceiling.
The throughput ceiling under a 200 million gas limit is projected at approximately 10,000 transactions per second, roughly ten times Ethereum's current capacity. This figure is aspirational; actual performance depends on client implementation quality, validator hardware capabilities, and real-world block parallelism achievable under BALs.
The gas limit increase would not happen at fork activation. Historical precedent suggests validators raise the limit gradually over weeks or months, as occurred with previous increases from 30 million to 36 million and from 36 million to 60 million.
Glamsterdam's development follows a structured pipeline:
| Milestone | Status | Date | |-----------|--------|------| | Soldøgn interop devnet | Complete | May 2, 2026 | | EIP-8037 finalization | Complete | May 2026 | | Multi-client devnets (devnet-5/6) | Active | Mid-June 2026 | | Public testnets (Holesky, Hoodi) | Pending | Est. July–August 2026 | | Mainnet activation | Pending | Target: late August 2026 |
The internal working target for mainnet activation is late August 2026. Developers have characterized this as aspirational. Given that recent forks have required two to four months of public testnet validation after devnet completion, a September to December 2026 window represents the firmer base case. Developers assign a 20–30% probability of slippage into Q4 2026, with EIP-7732's consensus-layer complexity cited as the primary risk factor.
The next named upgrade after Glamsterdam — Hegota — has already been identified by developers but has no EIP scope defined.
Glamsterdam intensifies an economic shift already visible in Ethereum's fee data.
Fee revenue decline. Ethereum L1 daily gas revenue has declined from approximately $23 million at its 2021-2022 peak to roughly $6.3 million in mid-2026. The average gas price sits at 0.47 gwei, down from 1.67 gwei a year earlier. On April 7, 2026, it touched 0.052 gwei. Q1 2026 network fee revenue totaled $1.42 billion.
Business model transition. Ethereum is transitioning from a high-margin computing platform monetizing per-transaction gas to a low-margin, high-volume settlement layer. The value proposition shifts to economic security and censorship-resistant finality. L2 networks — which already process the majority of Ethereum transaction volume — pay for data availability and settlement guarantees rather than execution.
ETH supply dynamics. Lower fee revenue reduces ETH burn under EIP-1559. Ethereum shifted from deflationary to approximately 0.8% annual inflation after the Dencun upgrade. Glamsterdam's fee reductions, if transaction volume does not proportionally increase, could widen this gap. This is the "fee-burn paradox": protocol improvements that reduce costs may diminish the monetary premium on ETH.
Validator economics. Running a full Ethereum validator node in 2026 requires 32 ETH, 8–12 CPU cores, 64 GB RAM, a 4 TB enterprise NVMe drive, and 100 Mbps bandwidth. The state-growth controls in EIP-8037 are designed to keep these requirements from escalating further under higher gas limits.
ePBS builder withholding. The "free option" problem — builders withholding payloads when market conditions shift during the revelation window — remains an unsolved game-theoretic concern. Builders engaged in CEX-DEX arbitrage may find it rational to forfeit block rewards rather than execute adverse trades.
Path dependency. Once PBS is codified in the protocol, Ethereum's block-production architecture becomes harder to modify. Alternative approaches — deterministic ordering, encrypted mempools, preconfirmation systems — may be foreclosed before reaching maturity.
State-growth modeling uncertainty. The 120 GiB per year state-growth ceiling under EIP-8037 assumes specific usage patterns. If demand characteristics shift — for instance, through widespread account abstraction or new smart-contract paradigms — the model may under- or over-estimate actual growth.
L1 fee demand. Higher capacity and lower fees do not guarantee proportional demand growth. If L2 networks continue absorbing the majority of transaction volume, Ethereum L1 may face persistent underutilization at the new capacity ceiling.
Glamsterdam is an infrastructure upgrade with direct economic consequences. The combination of ePBS and BALs removes structural bottlenecks that have constrained Ethereum's throughput since inception, while gas repricing rebalances the cost model to favor computation over storage. The projected capacity expansion from 60M to 200M gas per block would represent the largest single throughput increase in Ethereum's history.
The economic trade-offs are material. Every improvement that reduces per-transaction costs simultaneously reduces the fee burn that supports ETH's deflationary mechanics. Ethereum's response has been to pivot its value proposition: from selling gas to selling settlement guarantees. Whether that transition generates sufficient demand to sustain validator economics and ETH monetary premium remains the central unresolved question. The data available through mid-2026 — declining daily fee revenue, sub-1-gwei gas prices, and persistent inflation — suggests the market has not yet priced in a clear answer.