Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade completed a Devnet-11 drill and successfully confirmed blocks, according to the project update, as developers continued testing a proposed increase in the block gas limit from 60,000,000 to 200,000,000.

The latest drill tested two of Glamsterdam’s headline goals: much larger block capacity and block-level access lists. The access-list design is intended to let nodes fetch data and verify unrelated transactions in parallel, a change aimed at improving execution efficiency as Ethereum pushes for higher throughput on the base layer.

The update said block data propagation time would extend from roughly 2 seconds to 9 seconds to accommodate larger blocks. In testing, the Nethermind execution client processed 570,700,000,000 gas across 2,302 performance tests in 3 minutes and 15 seconds. Developers are targeting deployment on the Sepolia testnet on October 6, though that date still requires formal confirmation.

Different sources describe the matter differently, and the relevant details still require official confirmation.

What is clearer from the current update is that the 200,000,000 gas figure is not a finalized mainnet setting. It remains an experimental target tied to the upgrade’s broader architecture and has not been through adversarial stress testing. Ethereum’s roadmap materials and outside reporting also describe Glamsterdam as part of a wider effort to make higher gas limits workable through changes to block production, execution, and state growth controls, rather than through a simple parameter increase alone.

Why It Matters

Glamsterdam matters because it speaks to Ethereum’s next phase of base-layer scaling. If the upgrade’s design proves stable, it could expand how much activity Ethereum can handle directly on layer 1 while also creating more room for related network data flows. That would be a notable shift in a market where Ethereum scaling discussions often focus primarily on rollups.

At the same time, the update underscores that scaling Ethereum is still a coordination and infrastructure problem, not just a software milestone. Larger blocks, longer propagation windows, and heavier execution demands could reshape the operating requirements for validators and node operators, making technical performance and decentralization trade-offs central to the next stage of testing.