Ethereum Glamsterdam Nears Final Mile With Sepolia Test Set for October 6

What happened

Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter said Glamsterdam and EIP-7928, also known as Block-Level Access Lists, are close to the final mile. He said the upgrade will be among the biggest forks yet and that the long wait will be worth it.

The Ethereum Foundation confirmed the public testnet date. In a blog post, the foundation said the Sepolia testnet activation comes at epoch 353,024. That date is October 6, at around 13:53 UTC.

Testing continues on devnets, and the report says the countdown has begun for the first public test. The Sepolia fork is scheduled for October 6, 2026.

The mainnet launch is expected in Q4 2026, with no official date set.

Why it matters

Glamsterdam combines the Amsterdam execution layer upgrade with the Gloas consensus layer upgrade. The report describes ePBS as a headliner that revamps the block validation pipeline and reduces trust assumptions, while block-level access lists bring parallelization to Ethereum.

The upgrade changes how blocks are produced and validated to support higher L1 throughput. The report frames it as among the biggest Layer 1 scaling upgrades since the Merge.

The network is expected to have higher throughput, more efficient validation and a cleaner block production market. Glamsterdam also adjusts gas accounting to better reflect resource usage.

The upgrade centers on three main goals: speeding up processing, expanding capacity and preventing database bloat. After Glamsterdam, Hegota sets the stage for later work, and the Ethereum Foundation targets quantum resistance across execution, consensus and data layers by 2029.

What the data shows

Over the last 24 hours, Ethereum moved ahead of Bitcoin in perpetual futures open interest on Hyperliquid. ETH open interest was near $3.12 billion, and BTC open interest was $2.81 billion.

Coinglass data showed ETH futures open interest rising almost 2% in the last 4 hours. On individual venues, it climbed more than 2% on Binance, 0.56% on CME and 7% on Bybit.

The report adds that ETH/BTC has broken out of a nearly 5-year downtrend and is set to close its 3rd straight green month.

Background

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin shared a glimpse of a post-Hegota era. He described Ethereum as a hybrid architecture that combines blockchains and modern cryptography.

Citing a longer-range draft roadmap, Buterin noted that Hegota, planned for next year, may be Ethereum's last normal fork. He said everything after it will involve recursive STARKs, automated formal verification and optimized consensus algorithms to make Ethereum quantum-safe.

What is still unclear

• The Ethereum Foundation said Hoodi and mainnet dates are still undecided.
• The published date covers the Sepolia fork only, while the mainnet window is Q4 2026 with no official date.

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