Ethereum Sets October 26 Hoodi Test for Glamsterdam Upgrade
Ethereum’s original Glamsterdam plan targeted Hoodi on October 26. That activation has been postponed; the original upgrade overview follows.
Key Notes
- Ethereum originally scheduled Glamsterdam on Hoodi for October 26, but that activation has now been postponed.
- ePBS and block-level access lists change how Ethereum blocks are produced and validated.
- Mainnet activation remains unscheduled and mainnet ETH holders need take no action.
Update — October 23, 2026: Ethereum has postponed the October 26 Hoodi activation and removed the planned 200 million gas-limit increase. The schedule and activation instructions in this original report have been superseded. Read our latest report for the delay and revised operator guidance.
Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade was originally scheduled to activate on the Hoodi testnet on October 26 at 17:42:48 UTC, testing changes to block production, transaction validation and gas accounting before a mainnet rollout.
The Ethereum Foundation’s October 16 announcement originally set activation at epoch 132,352, or slot 4,235,264. Sepolia activated the upgrade on October 6. A mainnet date remains undecided.
Two Changes to How Blocks Are Built and Checked
Enshrined proposer-builder separation, or ePBS, brings the relationship between a block proposer and a specialized builder into Ethereum’s consensus rules. Under EIP-7732, the proposer includes a builder’s signed commitment, with the builder revealing the corresponding execution payload afterward.
The protocol provides a mechanism for paying the proposer and introduces a validator committee that checks whether the payload and associated blob data arrived on time. Separating consensus checks from execution validation gives validators more of the slot to verify execution, while reducing dependence on trusted intermediaries for the proposer-builder exchange.
The other headline change is block-level access lists. EIP-7928 records the accounts and storage locations a block accesses, alongside the resulting state changes. Clients can use that information for parallel disk reads, parallel transaction validation and more efficient state-root calculations.
Knowing which parts of the state a block touches helps clients organize work that would otherwise depend on discovering those accesses during execution. This creates a basis for greater execution capacity; it does not specify a guaranteed throughput increase for mainnet users.
Gas Repricing Requires Application Testing
EIP-8037 increases the cost of creating persistent state and meters that work separately from execution. Its purpose is to limit state growth as block capacity increases, rather than treating every resource as one undifferentiated gas budget.
A companion change, EIP-8038, updates state-access charges to reflect the cost of reading and writing Ethereum’s larger database. Scaling the network therefore does not mean every operation becomes cheaper.
Hoodi operators must install compatible execution and consensus clients before activation. Validators need both their beacon node and validator client updated. Application teams should test gas estimation and contracts that assume fixed gas limits or stipends. The announcement requires no action from mainnet ETH holders.
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