Ethereum's Glamsterdam Upgrade Takes Shape: Sepolia Testnet Fork Scheduled for October 6
Ethereum's long-awaited Glamsterdam upgrade is finally taking shape, with the Sepolia testnet fork scheduled for October 6, 2026. This marks a significant milestone in the network's scaling overhaul, but it's essential to note that this is still a rehearsal and not the main event.
The upgrade's scope is frozen for now, as the meta Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) remains in draft form. The proposal defines what will ship with Glamsterdam, which includes three key components: parallelization, expanded capacity, and database growth management.
One of the primary goals of Glamsterdam is to keep the network fast, affordable, and decentralized without pricing out node operators from home. To achieve this, the upgrade targets predictable database growth of roughly 120 GiB per year. The developers are calibrating at a 150M reference block gas limit to tune that pricing ahead of the 200M gas limit floor the upgrade would eventually unlock.