Ethereum’s upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade clears rehearsal for a big jump in capacity

Ethereum developers continued validating the Glamsterdam upgrade after implementing new block-building rules on a test network, moving toward a proposed public trial on Sepolia scheduled for Oct. 6. The rehearsal focused on changes intended to increase the chain’s capacity and enable more parallel processing of transactions. Nethermind’s execution client ran a focused performance benchmark, completing all 2,302 tests the team set, and processed 570.7 billion gas in 3 minutes and 15 seconds — an average of about 2.9 billion gas per second. The benchmark measured the execution software’s performance rather than end-to-end network speed. A central element of the trial was block-level access lists, which inform nodes in advance which accounts and storage a block will touch. That pre-notification lets nodes fetch data and validate unrelated transactions concurrently instead of performing much of the work sequentially, which is a current limiting factor for how much activity fits safely in each block. On the testnet, Glamsterdam raised the per-block gas limit from 60 million to 200 million roughly an hour after going live. Gas measures computational work required by transactions, so the higher ceiling is meant to allow more payments, swaps and other operations per block and reduce fee spikes during demand surges. The upgrade also lengthened the window for propagating block data across the network from about two seconds to nine seconds, giving validators more time to receive and check the larger blocks. Project leads emphasized that the 200 million gas setting was a test parameter, not a commitment for Ethereum’s main network, and that Devnet-11 was run as a controlled rehearsal without deliberate attacks.