Ethereum developers have entered the final stage of work on Glamsterdam — the network's next major upgrade. The teams have begun testing a version of the hard fork that includes the entire set of planned protocol changes.

Developers are now launching so-called devnets — early test environments where new code and protocol changes are verified before reaching public test networks. The environments already contain the full set of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) slated for the upgrade.

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The final phase before launch

According to Parithosh Jayanthi, core developer and devops engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, the teams are now working with devnets that include all the EIPs. This is the last phase before hardening the codebase and releasing it for testing. There are no exact timelines yet, but the progress, in his assessment, is enormous.

The exact activation date has not yet been set. Glamsterdam is expected to go live in the second half of 2026, and a number of independent estimates point to the end of August as the most likely benchmark.

The upgrade will be one of the most ambitious in Ethereum's history since the network's transition to the proof-of-stake (PoS) algorithm in 2022. Jayanthi called Glamsterdam probably the largest hard fork since The Merge. The developer added that the update will change many perceptions of Ethereum and lay the foundation for scaling in the future.

What Glamsterdam changes

Among the key innovations is enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) — EIP-7732. The technology moves into the core of the Ethereum protocol the separation between those who build transaction blocks and those who propose them. Today this process relies heavily on off-chain services, which creates "additional assumptions" about trust and risks of centralization. Moving the mechanism on-chain is intended to reduce the opportunities for manipulation related to maximal extractable value (MEV).

Source: BeInCrypto