[DigitalToday reporter Yoonseo Lee] Ethereum's next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, has been activated on the Sepolia testnet.

Cointelegraph, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Oct. 6 that the deployment is one of the key tests ahead of mainnet activation.

Pooja Ranjan (푸자 란잔), a figure in the Ethereum community, said on X, formerly Twitter, that Glamsterdam went live on Sepolia at 1:53 p.m. UTC on Oct. 6. The Ethereum Foundation said earlier in a Sept. 28 blog post that the upgrade focuses on advancing the layer 1 scaling roadmap. Key elements include enshrined proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists and a revamp of the gas pricing system to better reflect execution costs.

After the testnet deployment, developers plan to first set an activation schedule on the Hoodi testnet. They will then finalise the timing for the mainnet rollout. Glamsterdam follows the previous upgrade, Fusaka, and aims to improve scalability, strengthen layer 1 stability and enhance network usability.

Key changes include EIP-7732 and EIP-7928. EIP-7732 introduces a structure that separates proposers and builders, and also splits consensus verification from execution verification, giving validators more time to check execution payloads. Ethereum currently processes transactions in a single sequence, and parallel-processing-based scaling aims to increase transactions per second and block size without raising the gas limit.

EIP-7928 mandates block-level access lists. The lists record accounts and storage locations accessed in a given block and state changes after transactions. This allows clients to read disk state in parallel, validate transactions in parallel and compute state roots more efficiently.

Benchmarks related to speed improvements have also been set. The Ethereum Foundation has said it set a floor of 200 million for the gas limit in Glamsterdam in May. Compared with the current gas limit of about 60 million, that means network throughput could rise sharply after the upgrade.

The next stage on the development roadmap is already in preparation. After Glamsterdam is applied to the mainnet, Ethereum developers plan to begin implementing the next major upgrade, Hegotá. Developers have reviewed 66 proposals since August to narrow the scope of Hegotá, and some of them focus on adding privacy features to the protocol.

The Sepolia deployment is significant in that it goes beyond a simple test and serves as a verification process for the transition to the mainnet. The Hoodi testnet schedule and the mainnet rollout timing remain the next points to watch.

"Glamsterdam is live on Sepolia! Another Ethereum upgrade, with 18 Core + 7 Other EIPs, is now live on the Sepolia public testnet. A powerful demonstration of Ethereum’s public-goods infrastructure - open for projects, developers, and infrastructure providers to test compatibility with upcoming mainnet changes. Time to test! #Ethereum #Glamsterdam #Sepolia"