Ethereum's Glamsterdam Upgrade, Its Biggest Since the Merge, Enters the Final Development Stage - Unchained

Ethereum developers have entered the final stretch of work on Glamsterdam, the network’s next major upgrade, as teams begin testing a version of the fork that bundles all of its planned protocol changes.

Developers are currently running developer networks, or “devnets,” early environments used to trial new code before it reaches public testnets, containing the full suite of Ethereum Improvement Proposals slated for the upgrade. “We’re working on devnets with all the EIPs in them right now,” said Parithosh Jayanthi, a core developer and DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, according to Coindesk. “This is the last phase before we work on hardening and then shipping the testnets. There’s no fixed timeline, but we’ve made massive progress.” While no firm activation date has been set, Glamsterdam is expected to go live in the second half of the year. Jayanthi called it “probably the largest fork we’ve had since the Merge.”

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Among the headline features are enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (EIP-7732), which would move into Ethereum’s core protocol the separation between entities that build transaction blocks and those that propose them.

Today, that relies on offchain arrangements with added trust and centralization concerns; bringing it onchain is intended to reduce opportunities for manipulation tied to maximal extractable value, or MEV. A second major proposal, Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928), would let blocks declare in advance which accounts and contract data they will touch, allowing clients to preload information and execute blocks faster.

Beyond those, Glamsterdam includes a sweeping set of gas repricings intended to better align fees with the resources each operation consumes. The proposed changes, still preliminary, would make high-level computation cheaper while making state more expensive, lowering the base transaction cost while raising the cost of operations that expand Ethereum’s state.

Developers say the goal is to reduce bottlenecks and make the network easier to scale with zero-knowledge proving systems. For now, the focus is on testing, finalizing specifications, and explaining the repricing changes to the broader community before the code is hardened and shipped to public testnets.

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