A Beginner's Guide to the Ethereum Glamsterdam Upgrade
Glamsterdam is a planned upgrade involving both Ethereum's execution and consensus layers. It focuses on separating block-building duties, preparing for parallel processing, and pricing state growth. The upgrade's scope and mainnet timing may still change, so readers should follow the latest official progress.
Problems the Upgrade Seeks to Solve
Ethereum's current transaction execution, block propagation, and state storage jointly constrain scaling at the base layer. Glamsterdam plans to enable parallel processing of non-conflicting transactions, reorganize block construction and validation, and adjust the Gas cost of storage-related operations. The goal is to increase the processing capacity of each block while controlling the long-term resource burden on nodes.
Three Key Proposals
EIP-7732 proposes encoding the division of responsibilities between proposers and builders in the protocol while extending the propagation time for execution payloads. EIP-7928 uses block-level access lists to describe transaction data in advance, supporting parallel execution and node synchronization. EIP-8037 raises the cost of operations that create state so Gas pricing better reflects the long-term storage burden.
Capacity and State Costs Must Work Together
Raising the block Gas limit can accommodate more computational work, but it also increases propagation, validation, and long-term storage demands. Official discussions combine higher capacity with reforms to the cost of creating state. Capacity targets therefore must be understood in the context of specific proposals and test conditions, and must not be treated as guaranteed values for the day of the mainnet release.
Check the Timeline Against Official Progress
As of this review on September 23, 2026, the Ethereum website shows that the upgrade remains in devnet testing, with mainnet expected in the fourth quarter of 2026 and no confirmed date announced. Although the proposal scope has been frozen, adjustments may still occur before mainnet. The academy article's older internal targets for the third quarter and the year’s eighth month should no longer be treated as the current schedule.
Original Tutorial
https://www.binance.com/zh-CN/academy/articles/what-is-the-ethereum-glamsterdam-upgrade
Official Upgrade Progress
https://ethereum.org/roadmap/glamsterdam/