Ethereum Glamsterdam Upgrade: Largest-Scale Underlying Restructuring Yet, Mainnet Date Still Undecided
The upcoming Ethereum "Glamsterdam" upgrade is viewed by core developers as the most significant protocol-level refactoring since The Merge, fundamentally altering how the network processes transactions and manages its state to advance L1 scaling. Its core goals are: accelerating processing via parallelization, increasing capacity, and enhancing sustainability through adjusted fees that better reflect long-term data storage costs.
The upgrade features two headline proposals. First, **ePBS (EIP-7732)** on the consensus layer aims to formalize proposer-builder separation directly within the protocol, eliminating reliance on off-chain relayers. This built-in mechanism is designed to provide a more secure and efficient block production pipeline, extending the critical validation window to allow the network to handle more data, particularly for Layer2s.
Second, **BALs (EIP-7928)** on the execution layer introduces block-level access lists. These lists specify the data each transaction will access beforehand, allowing the network to identify and safely execute non-conflicting transactions in parallel, rather than strictly sequentially. This also speeds up new node synchronization.
Glamsterdam also includes配套 proposals to reprice storage costs (aiming for a predictable ~120 GiB annual state growth) and the cost of data-reading operations to better align with modern hardware costs and prevent spam.
Regarding the timeline, the initial schedule targeting a mainnet activation on September 16, 2026, has likely been delayed. Following the launch of a new dedicated testnet (Plataberget), the deployments on the Sepolia and Holesky testnets are now expected in September, with the mainnet launch potentially pushed to Q4 2026 or later, as developers prioritize correctness over a fixed date.
marsbit08/14 08:11
