Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade is now running on the Sepolia public testnet with a block processing budget that has climbed from about 60 million gas to nearly 200 million gas, giving developers a live environment to test changes meant to create more room for payments and trades.
The upgrade went live Tuesday on Sepolia, a public Ethereum test network where developers trial software with tokens that carry no real value before considering deployment on Ethereum itself.
By early Thursday, blocks on Sepolia were being produced with a gas limit near 200 million, up from roughly 60 million before the change. Gas is the unit used to measure the computing work required to process transactions.
On Ethereum’s live network, users compete for block space when too many transactions arrive at once, which can push fees higher. A larger processing allowance could let the chain absorb more activity before that competition becomes more intense.
Still, Glamsterdam is not simply a raw capacity increase. The upgrade also changes how much gas specific tasks consume, so a threefold jump in the budget does not directly mean three times as many transactions.
Early test blocks stayed far below the new ceiling
CoinDesk reviewed more than 25 consecutive test blocks and found that each used about 52 million to 92 million gas, or roughly 26% to 46% of the available allowance. None of those blocks came close to full utilization.
That matters because the heavier strain on the computers running the network would show up when blocks approach their limit, not while usage remains comfortably below it.
All 32 scheduled blocks were proposed in a six-minute voting window
According to the ethPandaOps explorer, a separate six-minute voting period early Thursday saw all 32 scheduled blocks proposed, while 99.97% of eligible testnet stake voted toward finality.
Finality is the point at which the network treats its transaction history as settled. In that test window, Sepolia continued producing every scheduled block and drew near-total participation from eligible stake.
The upgrade changes how transaction work is handed off
Glamsterdam changes how Ethereum’s computers divide this work. It places the handoff between “specialists” that assemble transactions and validators that publish blocks into the network’s rules, giving validators more time to check transaction calculations.
Blocks also include a list of the accounts and stored data touched by their transactions. Software can use that list to fetch data ahead of time and check unrelated transactions in parallel instead of processing everything one item after another.
Storage creation and access charges were also adjusted
Handling more activity still adds pressure to the computers that run Ethereum. Glamsterdam changes the charges for creating and accessing stored data, and developers have been told to retest applications that assume particular gas costs.
That means software built around older gas assumptions may need fresh validation under the new rules.
Hoodi is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 27, with no mainnet date yet
The next public test network, Hoodi, is tentatively set for Oct. 27, depending on the Sepolia results. Ethereum still has no activation date for Glamsterdam on mainnet.