Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork — tracked under Meta EIP-7773 — has entered public testnet with the August 17 launch of the Platåberget network and a fork activation date of August 20. The upgrade ships ten EIPs, headlined by EIP-7732 (Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) and EIP-7928 (Block-L...
"Ethereum has effectively been running in single-lane mode: one long queue of transactions, executed strictly in order. Even with multi-core CPUs, validation stays sequential. BALs change that." — Toni Wahrstätter, Ethereum Foundation Researcher
Ethereum's Glamsterdam hard fork — tracked under Meta EIP-7773 — has entered public testnet with the August 17 launch of the Platåberget network and a fork activation date of August 20. The upgrade ships ten EIPs, headlined by EIP-7732 (Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) and EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists). Together, they lay the structural groundwork for raising the network's gas limit from its current 60 million to a target floor of 200 million, roughly tripling L1 capacity and enabling what proponents model as approximately 10,000 TPS-equivalent throughput under realistic workloads.
The upgrade eliminates Ethereum's dependency on third-party MEV-Boost relays — middleware that currently intermediates 95%+ of block production — by enshrining the proposer-builder handoff directly in the consensus protocol. Separately, Block-Level Access Lists make parallel transaction execution deterministic across all clients, converting Ethereum's single-threaded validation model into a multi-lane architecture that leverages existing multi-core hardware. Mainnet activation is targeted for Q4 2026, pending stability confirmation on the Sepolia and Hoodi testnets.
Ethereum's L1 processes approximately 25.59 TPS as of March 2026, according to network data. The gas limit — raised from 30 million to 60 million between the Pectra and Fusaka upgrades in 2025 — caps per-block computation. Every transaction executes sequentially. A block touching 1,000 storage slots processes them one at a time, regardless of whether those slots are independent.
Block production operates through MEV-Boost, an off-chain relay system created by Flashbots. Over 95% of Ethereum validators use MEV-Boost because it adds 10–30% to staking rewards on top of a 2.78% base APR. As of August 31, 2026, relay market share concentrates among three operators: Ultrasound Money (35.26%), Titan Relay (27.99%), and bloXroute Regulated (25.40%), according to relayscan.io data. Flashbots' own relay handles just 2.39% of payloads.
The relay layer intermediates approximately $550 million in annual MEV extraction on Ethereum alone. A compromised or censoring relay can withhold payloads, censor transactions, or become a single point of failure for block production. This dependency is the structural problem Glamsterdam addresses.
EIP-7773 lists ten proposals as Scheduled for Inclusion, finalized during the Soldøgn interop devnet which concluded May 2, 2026:
| EIP | Description | |-----|-------------| | EIP-7732 | Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) | | EIP-7928 | Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) | | EIP-8037 | State creation gas cost increase; fixed cost-per-state-byte with separate gas reservoir | | EIP-7708 | ETH transfers emit a log (removes need for custom transaction tracing) | | EIP-7778 | Block gas accounting without refunds (more predictable builder costs) | | EIP-7843 | SLOTNUM opcode | | EIP-7954 | Validator-related improvements | | EIP-7976 | Consensus layer changes | | EIP-7981 | Execution layer optimization | | EIP-8024 | Additional protocol improvements |
The two headliners — EIP-7732 and EIP-7928 — do the structural heavy lifting. The remaining eight handle gas repricing, developer tooling, and state management sustainability.
The current MEV-Boost architecture works as follows: searchers identify profitable transaction orderings and submit bundles to builders, who assemble full blocks and bid for inclusion through relays, which act as trusted intermediaries between builders and the block-proposing validator. The relay holds the builder's payload and the proposer's signed commitment, releasing both atomically.
EIP-7732 moves this entire exchange in-protocol. The Ethereum consensus layer itself enforces the builder-proposer handoff. No relay required. The payload-timeliness committee — a new protocol-level mechanism — verifies that builders deliver payloads on time, replacing the trust assumption currently placed on relay operators.
Nine out of twelve stakeholder teams ranked ePBS as their first or second priority for Glamsterdam during the All Core Developers Consensus Call #162 scoping process.
After activation, relays become optional — a convenience layer rather than the trust anchor for block production. According to Flashbots Collective research, the shift could reduce MEV-related losses for ordinary users by up to 70%.
Block-Level Access Lists attach a precise map to each block: every account address, storage slot, balance, nonce, and code hash touched during execution, along with post-transaction state diffs.
This data serves multiple purposes:
Parallel execution. With explicit access maps, clients can detect conflicts deterministically, resolve dependencies, and execute non-conflicting transactions simultaneously across CPU cores. Current sequential validation becomes multi-lane.
Prefetched disk I/O. Clients read required state from disk before block execution begins, eliminating the I/O bottleneck that dominates block processing time.
Parallel state root computation. Post-state roots can be computed on the fly rather than after full sequential processing.
Faster sync. New nodes skip the peer-negotiation healing phase that snap sync currently requires, computing state updates directly from BAL data.
Historical data shows an average BAL size of approximately 70 KiB per block. Multiple client teams have working prototypes. No consensus-layer changes are required — BALs are purely an execution-layer addition.
Glamsterdam does not enforce a new gas limit. Validators set the limit via standard gas-vote signaling — the same mechanism that moved the limit from 30M to 60M. What Glamsterdam does is remove the technical barriers that make higher limits unsafe.
EIP-8037 plays a critical role here. Finalized in May 2026, it introduces a fixed cost-per-state-byte (CPSB) charged at runtime and dedicates a separate gas reservoir for state growth. This caps state bloat at approximately 120 GiB per year under a 200M gas limit — a sustainability ceiling that client teams require before signaling for higher limits.
The Ethereum Foundation's Platåberget testnet announcement notes a practical consequence: "Any tool that relies on a hardcapped maximum gas limit — think wallets, indexers, and gas estimators — will break and needs to be updated." Plain ETH transfers to new accounts will cost more than the traditional 21,000 gas due to additional state gas charges.
The maximum contract size increases from 24 KiB to 64 KiB. Maximum initcode size rises from 48 KiB to 128 KiB.
| Milestone | Date | Status | |-----------|------|--------| | Soldøgn interop devnet concluded | May 2, 2026 | Complete | | Final multi-client devnet stage | Mid-June 2026 | Complete | | Platåberget testnet launched | August 17, 2026 | Live | | Glamsterdam fork on Platåberget | August 20, 2026 | Scheduled | | Sepolia/Hoodi testnet forks | TBD | Pending | | Mainnet activation | Q4 2026 (target) | Pending |
Platåberget is a short-term testnet bootstrapped from public validator deposits rather than pre-allocated stakes. The Ethereum Foundation opened a faucet for testnet ETH and validator deposits. Holesky and Hoodi (or equivalent long-lived testnets) will fork before mainnet, and activation proceeds only after multi-client stability holds across several epochs.
Recent Ethereum forks have required two to four months of public-testnet testing before mainnet. Applied to the August 20 Platåberget fork date, this places the mainnet window at approximately October–December 2026.
MEV-Boost becomes optional. Validators currently running MEV-Boost (95%+ of the network) will retain the option but gain an in-protocol alternative. The economic incentive to use external relays diminishes as protocol-level builder competition increases.
Exit mechanics improve. According to Figment's institutional staking analysis (August 5, 2026, authored by Benjamin Thalman, Staff Protocol Analyst), EIP-8061 modeling shows validator exits processing approximately 4.8x faster and consolidations approximately 2.4x faster than current rates. For institutional stakers managing large validator sets, this reduces liquidity risk on position changes.
Infrastructure updates are mandatory. Gas estimators, wallet backends, indexers, and node operators must update for the new state gas dimension, BAL data structures, and ePBS payload-timeliness checks. The scope of breaking changes is broader than typical hard forks.
Staking yield composition shifts. With ePBS, the MEV revenue share flowing to validators may change as in-protocol competition restructures builder economics. Current MEV-Boost revenue adds roughly 0.28–0.83% yield on a 2.78% base APR.
Vitalik Buterin outlined the limitation in a March 2, 2026 blog post: ePBS prevents builder centralization from spilling over into the validator layer, but builder centralization itself remains. A handful of sophisticated builders could still monopolize transaction sequencing and capture disproportionate MEV.
Buterin's proposed solution — Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists (FOCIL), confirmed as the headliner for the subsequent Hegotá upgrade — would require a randomly selected committee of validators to create mandatory inclusion lists for each block. Combined with encrypted mempools, this would make it structurally difficult for builders to censor transactions or extract value through front-running.
Glamsterdam is the foundation layer. FOCIL is the enforcement layer. Neither works alone.
Glamsterdam is the largest structural change to Ethereum's execution and consensus layers since The Merge. It addresses two systemic dependencies — relay-mediated block production and sequential transaction validation — that have constrained L1 throughput and concentrated trust in a small number of middleware operators.
The practical impact depends on validator adoption of higher gas limits after activation and on ecosystem tooling updates for the new state gas dimension. The Ethereum Foundation's warning that wallets, indexers, and gas estimators "will break" underscores the scope of required downstream updates.
If the gas limit reaches 200M through validator signaling post-fork, Ethereum's L1 moves from approximately 25 TPS to a modeled 10,000 TPS-equivalent — a capacity expansion that would materially alter the economic calculus for applications currently routing through L2 rollups. Whether that migration happens depends on gas pricing, state growth sustainability, and whether the parallel execution model performs as modeled under mainnet conditions.