Prysm Updates Before Glamsterdam Sepolia Testnet Upgrade

Offchain Labs, the team behind the Prysm Ethereum consensus client, released version 7.2.1 on Monday, just hours before the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Sepolia testnet. This update ensures that validators using Prysm will default to a 200 million gas limit once the fork activates, eliminating the need for manual adjustments. The previous version, 7.2.0, had a default gas limit of 60 million, requiring operators to manually set the higher limit.

The Glamsterdam upgrade is scheduled to go live on Sepolia at epoch 353,024, which translates to 13:53:36 UTC on October 6. Sepolia serves as a test network for developers to experiment with protocol changes before they are implemented on the mainnet. The gas limit increase to 200 million was part of a configuration update on September 24, under EIP-8261.

Version 7.2.1 also introduces partial data columns by default, allowing nodes to trade individual cells of blob data rather than entire columns, and fixes a bug related to building the first post-fork block. However, validators who still have a gas limit flag set from older configurations will override the 200 million limit, and the client now warns users about this at startup.

Meanwhile, another consensus client, Teku, still defaults to a 60 million gas limit after activation. Validators using Teku must manually set the higher limit with a command-line flag. The Glamsterdam upgrade includes two sets of changes: Gloas on the consensus side and Amsterdam on the execution side, with notable features like enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists.