Ethereum’s Biggest Upgrade Since the Merge Is Almost Here — Here’s What Changes

TLDR

Ethereum developers are running devnets with all planned changes included, marking the final phase before public testnets Glamsterdam is expected to be the biggest Ethereum upgrade since the Merge in 2022 Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) will bring block building into Ethereum’s core protocol Block-level Access Lists will let blocks pre-declare which data they need, speeding up execution Gas repricing will make heavy computing cheaper but storing data on-chain more expensive

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Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade is now in its final development phase. Developers are running private test networks, called devnets, with the full set of planned protocol changes included.

LATEST: Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade is now in its final development phase ahead of testnet deployment, with a mainnet launch expected in H2 2026. pic.twitter.com/ubz4FasitR

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Parithosh Jayanthi, a core developer and DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, confirmed the milestone.

“We’re working on devnets with all the EIPs in them right now,” he said. “This is the last phase before we work on hardening and then shipping the testnets.”

There is no fixed launch date yet, but the upgrade is expected to go live in the second half of 2026.

The Biggest Upgrade Since the Merge

Jayanthi described Glamsterdam as “probably the largest fork we’ve had since the Merge.” The Merge happened in 2022 and moved Ethereum from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.

He added that the upgrade will “change a lot of assumptions about Ethereum and set us up for much more scaling in the future.”

Glamsterdam follows the Fusaka upgrade, which launched in December 2025. Fusaka focused on foundational refinements, while Glamsterdam targets deeper architectural changes to Ethereum’s Layer 1.

The upgrade includes three major technical changes that work together to improve how the network runs.

Bringing Block Building Into the Core Protocol

The first major change is enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, tracked as EIP-7732.

Right now, the process of building and proposing transaction blocks happens mostly off-chain. This creates trust concerns and opens the door to manipulation tied to maximal extractable value, or MEV.

EIP-7732 moves this process directly into Ethereum’s core protocol. The goal is to make block production fairer and reduce chances for manipulation.

The second major change is Block-level Access Lists, tracked as EIP-7928. This feature lets each block declare in advance which accounts and smart contract data it will need.

Ethereum clients can then preload that information ahead of time, rather than searching for it during execution. This makes block processing faster and more predictable.

The third change is a wide-ranging set of gas repricings. Gas is how Ethereum charges users for actions on the network.

After the upgrade, heavy computing tasks will become cheaper. Storing data on-chain will become more expensive.

“This will majorly change the cost of actions on Ethereum,” Jayanthi said. “High-level compute gets cheaper and state gets more expensive.”

The repricing is also designed to make Ethereum work better with zero-knowledge proving systems, which are used in modern scaling solutions.

Developers are currently testing, finalizing specs, and speaking with the Ethereum community about what the repricing changes mean for users and developers.

The next step is moving from devnets to public testnets before a final mainnet launch.

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