The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade is tentatively scheduled to activate on the Sepolia testnet on October 6 at 13:53 UTC. Developers still need another stable development-network transition before moving the planned protocol changes onto Ethereum’s public testing infrastructure.
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The proposed date came from the September 3 All Core Developers Consensus meeting, known as ACDC #186. Ethereum protocol researcher Christine D. Kim reported that developers selected the Sepolia target while keeping it dependent on further testing.
Attention has now shifted to Glamsterdam Devnet-11. The test network is scheduled to launch on September 14, with its Gloas fork planned two days later.
Why Is the Ethereum Glamsterdam Upgrade Date Conditional?
The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade Sepolia activation date is still under consideration due to issues detected in previous private tests. Developers seek to have a successful fork transition before launching the October public testnet.
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Devnet-9 was tested using around 1,000 nodes; however, the testing failed due to the lack of validator finality. According to engineer Stefan Starflinger, some Prysm nodes were using an older version with missing protocol updates.
At the same time, Lighthouse nodes faced memory issues following the restarts. This problem was associated with the caching process and big validator configuration of the network.
Finality is achieved by enough validators agreeing on the chain history of Ethereum. Loss of finality does not necessarily imply failure of the chain, but it means that transactions do not have the usual settlement assurances from the network.
Thus, the necessity to conduct another coordinated test arose. Devnet-10 was used for consensus-testing purposes while Devnet-11 became a major test of the transition for the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade.
What Is the Glamsterdam Devnet-11 Launch Schedule?
The Glamsterdam Devnet-11 launch schedule will see the genesis on September 14 at 12:00 UTC, and the Gloas fork will happen on September 16, the same time, giving a 48-hour window before its activation.
It will consist of 84,000 validators operating on various combinations of execution and consensus clients. The groups working on this include Lido, Optimism, and Arbitrum, apart from others.
Devnet-11 was developed primarily for normal fork transition testing. Adversarial testing is still to be done on Devnet-8, ensuring isolation of testing purposes.
Ethereum client testing now faces stricter readiness standards for the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade. Consensus clients must meet a defined release baseline, while execution software must pass the Glamsterdam test suite before joining the network.
This rule was put in place owing to the vulnerability experienced in Devnet-9 when some of the teams were using development branches without a common specification baseline, which made the nodes miss out on some crucial fork updates.
Why Are EIP-8037 State Creation Gas Costs Changing?
EIP-8037 represents yet another aspect of the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade. It involves changing gas fees for actions that lead to permanently adding information to the Ethereum state.
These actions involve the creation of accounts, deployment of smart contracts, and creating storage items. EIP-8037 differentiates between the state-creation fee and execution gas and introduces a flat fee based on the number of bytes created in the state.
The EIP was devised to control the growth of the database as Ethereum increases the gas limit per block. The EIP’s specification defines a state-byte fee with respect to a reference block gas limit of 150 million.
Devnet-11 has a modification of the state gas refunding process. It is concerned with how the gas is refunded from the child execution frame upon its merging into the parent frame.
Other fixes have been identified during testing, including one where bids are rejected if there is a match of block hashes with the parent block hash.
What Shapes the Ethereum Glamsterdam Mainnet Timeline?
Even if the Devnet-11 test proves to be successful, it does not guarantee that Glamsterdam will be activated on the Ethereum mainnet. It is necessary to conduct more tests, such as Sepolia and others, in order to confirm the schedule of the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade mainnet.
The network Hoodi is intended to become another phase of public testing, especially when it comes to the staking infrastructure development. Nevertheless, there is no official information about the activation date of Hoodi.
According to the Ethereum roadmap, the upgrade will be implemented in the fourth quarter of 2026, though it is marked as an unconfirmed one. Thus, the discussion about the implementation of the upgrade in December should be considered as goals.
So, the Ethereum Glamsterdam update depends on the outcomes of other tests. The finality of validators, client interoperability, and fixes in specifications will be considered by the developers before making any conclusions.
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