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Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade has entered its final development milestone, with core developers running private testing environments (devnets) that include the full set of protocol changes planned for deployment. Parithosh Jayanthi, a core developer and DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, said developers are currently working on devnets “with all the EIPs in them,” describing this as the last phase before hardening and shipping the testnets.
Jayanthi did not provide an exact deployment date, but current projections place the upgrade’s mainnet activation in the latter months of 2026. The upgrade is described as being in its final development phase ahead of testnet deployment, with a mainnet launch expected in H2 2026.
Jayanthi characterized Glamsterdam as “probably the largest fork we’ve had since the Merge.” The Merge, which took place in September 2022, shifted Ethereum’s consensus mechanism from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
He said the upgrade will “change a lot of assumptions about Ethereum and set us up for much more scaling in the future.” Glamsterdam follows the Fusaka upgrade, which went live in December 2025. While Fusaka focused on fundamental protocol refinements, Glamsterdam introduces more substantial architectural changes to Ethereum’s base layer.
The first major implementation is enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, specified as EIP-7732. Jayanthi noted that block construction and proposing transaction blocks currently operate largely outside the core protocol, which can create trust dependencies and vulnerabilities related to maximal extractable value (MEV) exploitation.
EIP-7732 moves this process into Ethereum’s base protocol layer, aiming to make block production more equitable and reduce opportunities for value-extraction manipulation.
The second component introduces Block-level Access Lists (EIP-7928). This feature allows blocks to explicitly declare which account states and smart contract storage they will need before execution begins.
By enabling clients to fetch and cache required data ahead of time, the change is intended to remove the need for real-time database queries during block validation. The expected outcome is faster processing and more consistent performance.
The third element is a broad restructuring of gas pricing. Gas is Ethereum’s fee mechanism for measuring and charging computational resource use. After the upgrade, computationally intensive operations are expected to cost less, while on-chain data storage is expected to become substantially more expensive.
Jayanthi summarized the shift as: “High-level compute gets cheaper and state gets more expensive.” He also said the revised pricing model is optimized to improve compatibility with zero-knowledge proof systems, which are used in modern Layer 2 scaling infrastructure.
Developers are conducting comprehensive testing, completing technical specifications, and consulting the broader Ethereum ecosystem about how the pricing changes may affect users and application developers. The roadmap ahead is to move from internal devnets to publicly accessible testnets, followed by final deployment to the production mainnet.
