Ethereum Glamsterdam Upgrade Nears Completion Amid Ambitious Technical Agenda

The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade is nearing its final development phase and will be tested on Sepolia testnet fork on October 6, 2026. According to Toni Wahrstätter, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, Glamsterdam with EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) is approaching the final mile, and things look great.

The upgrade aims to increase transaction processing speed through parallelization, expand network capacity, and prevent long-term database bloat. It will feature ePBS, a reworked block validation pipeline, and Block-Level Access Lists, which unlock parallelization on Ethereum.

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin notes that the next hard fork, Glamsterdam, is expected to accelerate base-layer synchronization even further. He also hints at the network's vision beyond the Hegota fork, describing it as a genuine architectural turning point rather than an incremental update.

Glamsterdam may be the upgrade grabbing near-term attention, but Buterin's comments suggest Ethereum's engineers are already looking well past it. The network's next chapter will involve recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, and highly optimized consensus algorithms designed to make Ethereum quantum-safe.