The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade — described by core developers as the network’s most significant protocol overhaul since The Merge — is entering the home stretch. After reaching its final devnet phase in mid-June, the hard fork is now moving toward public testnet deployments that observers expect in the July-to-August window, with mainnet activation targeted for the second half of 2026 and an optimistic internal goal of Q3, according to reporting from The Defiant and CoinDesk. The fork bundles two headline changes — Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) and Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) — alongside an ambitious push toward a 200 million gas limit. For users, stakers, Layer 2 networks and anyone watching the Ethereum price, the next few months of testing will determine whether the schedule holds. Here is what is in the upgrade, what got left out, and what comes next.

What Is the Ethereum Glamsterdam Upgrade?

Glamsterdam is the next major hard fork on Ethereum’s roadmap, following the network’s established pattern of paired execution-layer and consensus-layer upgrades. As with previous forks, the name is a portmanteau: it combines the consensus-layer name “Gloas” with the execution-layer name “Amsterdam,” a naming convention documented on the official ethereum.org roadmap page and explained in overviews from BingX Learn.

The scale of the changes is what sets this fork apart. According to CoinDesk, the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade moved into its final development stage in June 2026, and core developers have characterized it as the most significant protocol change since The Merge in 2022. Where recent forks such as Dencun and Pectra focused on blob capacity and account abstraction, Glamsterdam restructures how blocks are built, validated and executed at a fundamental level.

Per crypto.news, the fork also marks a strategic shift: after several years in which scaling work centered on making life cheaper for Layer 2 rollups, the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade puts Layer 1 scaling back in focus, aiming to lift the base chain’s own throughput rather than only expanding data capacity for rollups.

The Headline EIPs: ePBS and Block-Level Access Lists

Two proposals anchor the fork, one on each layer of the protocol.

EIP-7732: Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation

On the consensus side, EIP-7732 brings proposer-builder separation directly into the protocol. Today, the separation between validators who propose blocks and specialized builders who construct them is handled by out-of-protocol infrastructure. ePBS enshrines that division at the protocol level, separating the heavy task of validating transactions from the task of reaching consensus, as explained by Datawallet and Everstake.

The practical payoff, per Datawallet’s analysis, is timing. ePBS expands the data propagation window within each slot from roughly 2 seconds to roughly 9 seconds. That wider window unblocks Ethereum’s ability to safely carry much larger blocks and more data blobs per block — the raw material Layer 2 networks depend on for cheap data availability. Analysis from Sigma Prime, one of the consensus client teams, framed the choice of Glamsterdam’s headliner around exactly these propagation and throughput trade-offs.

EIP-7928: Block-Level Access Lists

On the execution side, EIP-7928 introduces Block-Level Access Lists. Under BALs, each block declares in advance which accounts and storage slots its transactions will touch. Clients can then execute non-overlapping transactions in parallel rather than strictly one after another, lifting effective Layer 1 throughput without simply cranking up the gas limit, according to Datawallet and the proposal discussion on Ethereum Magicians. BALs also speed up state syncing and validation, since nodes know ahead of time what state a block requires.

Together, the two EIPs attack the same bottleneck from opposite ends: ePBS gives the network more time to move bigger blocks around, and BALs let clients chew through those blocks faster once they arrive.

The Full EIP Lineup and the 200 Million Gas Target

Beyond the two headliners, the devnets currently running include a broader slate of improvements. According to The Defiant and Crypto Briefing, the package being tested contains:

• EIP-7708 — ETH transfers and burns emit a log, making plain ETH movements easier to track and index.
• EIP-7778 — block gas accounting without refunds, tightening how gas usage is measured at the block level.
• EIP-7843 — a SLOTNUM opcode, giving contracts direct access to the current slot number.
• EIP-7954 — raising the maximum contract size from roughly 24 KiB to 32 KiB, giving developers more room per deployed contract.
• EIP-7975 — eth/70 partial block receipt lists, a networking-protocol improvement.
• EIP-8024 — backward-compatible SWAPN, DUPN and EXCHANGE opcodes for more efficient stack handling in the EVM.
• EIP-8037 — an increase in state-creation gas costs, discouraging cheap state bloat.
• EIP-8159 — eth/71 Block Access List Exchange, the networking counterpart to BALs.

The most attention-grabbing number attached to the fork, however, is the gas limit. Developers are targeting a 200 million gas limit in connection with the upgrade, per The Defiant and Bitcoin.com News — a dramatic step up in block capacity. Coverage from XBTFX describes the planned rise from today’s 60 million gas per block to 200 million, alongside long-term throughput ambitions in the thousands of transactions per second. It is worth noting that Ethereum’s gas limit is ultimately set by validator signaling rather than hard-coded in a fork, so the 200 million figure is a target the upgrade is designed to make safe, not an automatic switch that flips at activation.

What Happened to 6-Second Blocks? EIP-7782 Left Out

One widely discussed proposal did not make the cut. EIP-7782, which would halve Ethereum’s slot time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, was floated for Glamsterdam after being proposed in mid-2025 — CoinDesk reported at the time that faster slots were pitched as a way to boost speed, cut effective fees and improve user experience across DeFi and Layer 2 networks.

Developers ultimately declined to include it in this fork. According to analysis compiled from client-team discussions and reported by Datawallet, the concerns were threefold: halving slot times risked complicating real-time ZK proving, which is already close to hitting the 12-second target; a later restructuring of slot phases (which ePBS itself begins) would force a timing recalibration anyway; and the proposal was simply less mature than the rival headliners. Faster blocks would also raise bandwidth demands and could squeeze slower home validators, a trade-off noted by XT.com’s coverage of the original proposal.

EIP-7782 is not dead. It remains an active proposal and, per Everstake, is likely to be reconsidered for Hegota — the fork expected to follow Glamsterdam — or a later upgrade, once ePBS and BALs are safely deployed and the network’s timing assumptions have been rebuilt around them.

Timeline: Devnets Now, Public Testnets Next, Mainnet in H2 2026

Where does the process actually stand as of early July 2026? The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade reached its final devnet stage in mid-June, with developers running multi-client devnets that include the full slate of planned EIPs, according to Crypto Briefing and CoinCentral. This is the last major engineering phase before client releases, security reviews and public testnets.

The next milestone is the one most users can watch directly: public testnet forks. The Holesky and Hoodi testnets are slated to fork before mainnet, and stability needs to hold across multiple epochs on each before developers will schedule the real thing, per The Defiant. Given the current state of devnet testing, those public testnet activations are broadly expected in the coming weeks — the July-to-August window — assuming no critical issues surface in the final devnet round.

Mainnet is where the ranges get wider, and readers should treat every date here as provisional. Developers are officially targeting the second half of 2026, per CoinCentral and the ethereum.org roadmap. Some staking providers cite an optimistic internal target of around Q3 2026, according to Datawallet — but the same analysis notes that recent forks needed two to four months of public-testnet seasoning, making a window of roughly September to December 2026 the firmer base case. Ethereum’s fork history is instructive: no mainnet date is locked until public testnets have run clean, and slips of a quarter or more have happened before.

One practical note for anyone tempted to act on rumors: the fork activates on testnets and mainnet at scheduled epochs announced by client teams, and there is nothing an ordinary holder needs to do to “receive” the upgrade. ETH balances, staked positions and smart contracts carry over unchanged. As with past forks, users should be alert to scams that invoke upgrade branding to solicit token swaps or wallet migrations — no legitimate Ethereum upgrade has ever required one.

What Glamsterdam Means for Users, Stakers and Layer 2s

For ordinary users, the promised benefits arrive indirectly but meaningfully. Higher Layer 1 capacity — through parallel execution under BALs and the eventual climb toward a 200 million gas limit — is intended to relieve fee pressure on the base chain, while the wider propagation window under ePBS lets Ethereum carry more blobs per block. Per Datawallet, Layer 2 rollups are among the primary beneficiaries: BALs improve parallel throughput, and continued blob expansion keeps rollup data-availability costs low, which flows through to cheaper transactions on networks built on top of Ethereum. Guides from Conduit and QuickNode make the same point for infrastructure operators: the fork is designed to raise the ceiling on what both L1 and L2s can process.

For validators and stakers, ePBS is the change to study. Enshrining proposer-builder separation alters the block-production pipeline that staking operations have built tooling around, and it is explicitly aimed at reducing reliance on out-of-protocol relay infrastructure — a long-standing centralization concern. Staking providers such as Everstake have published operational overviews, and client teams will ship coordinated releases that node operators must install before the fork, as with every hard fork.

For smart contract developers, the quality-of-life items matter: a 32 KiB contract size ceiling under EIP-7954 relaxes a constraint that has forced awkward contract-splitting patterns since 2016, EIP-7708’s transfer logs simplify indexing plain ETH movements, and the new opcodes in EIP-7843 and EIP-8024 offer modest efficiency gains. None of these will make headlines, but they accumulate.

The Ethereum Price Angle: How Markets Are Framing the Upgrade

Protocol upgrades and the Ethereum price have a complicated historical relationship, and Glamsterdam is no exception. Commentary from Phemex argues ETH traders should care because the fork targets the exact complaints — fees, throughput, centralized block building — that have historically pushed activity and capital toward rival chains. The structural bull case, as outlined by XBTFX, runs through fees: cheaper blockspace revives on-chain demand that was priced out during high-fee periods, and more activity means more EIP-1559 fee burning, which tightens ETH supply over time.

More speculative takes exist — Bitget News has carried predictions pairing the upgrade with tokenization growth to argue for targets as high as $8,000 — but such figures are forecasts, not analysis, and should be weighted accordingly. On the cautious side, forecast services have published far more modest near-term scenarios for the Ethereum price in 2026, per CoinDCX, and MEXC News has noted that prediction markets are actively pricing ETH volatility around the upgrade’s milestones. The most concrete risk flagged in coverage is schedule slippage: XBTFX notes that a delay from the optimistic Q3 window into Q4 — or beyond — would likely pressure the Ethereum price as the market reprices expectations. In short, the upgrade is a genuine fundamental catalyst, but its timing risk cuts both ways, and none of the price scenarios circulating should be read as guarantees.

Conclusion: A Big Fork With Real Momentum — and Real Schedule Risk

The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade is further along than any comparable overhaul at this point in its cycle: the full EIP slate is running on multi-client devnets, the headline architecture questions (ePBS and BALs in, 6-second slots out) are settled, and public testnets on Holesky and Hoodi are the next visible milestone, plausibly within the July-August window. If those testnets run clean, an aggressive Q3 2026 mainnet activation remains on the table; if they surface issues — as public testnets often do — the more conservative September-to-December range cited by analysts becomes the operative timeline.

What can be said with confidence is narrower but still significant. The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade represents the network’s most ambitious restructuring since The Merge, it is designed to make a 200 million gas limit and meaningfully higher L1 and L2 throughput safe, and the developer process around it has so far hit its intermediate milestones. What cannot be said with confidence is exactly when mainnet activates, how quickly validators actually raise the gas limit afterward, or how the ETH market will trade the event — upgrades have historically produced both rallies and sell-the-news reversals, and the honest position is that no one knows which this will be. Watch the public testnet forks over the next several weeks; they will tell the market more than any prediction can.