The first public trial of Ethereum’s upcoming hard fork is now on the calendar. Glamsterdam is due to fork the Sepolia testnet on Oct. 6, 2026. Developers expect mainnet in the fourth quarter of 2026, although no official date has been set.
That difference is important. Setting a testnet date shows the developers feel ready to take the upgrade public. What it doesn’t reveal is when your wallet, your node or the games you play on Ethereum will actually be operating under the new rules.
An optimistic message from the research side
Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter struck a confident note in a recent post on X. “Glamsterdam with EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) is approaching the final mile, and things look great,” Wahrstätter said.
He laid out the gains he anticipates from the fork: “Significant throughput increase thanks to parallelism,” “Faster and simpler sync via snap v2” and an architecture that is “Future-compatible with zkEVMs, partially stateful nodes, inclusion lists.”
According to Wahrstätter, Glamsterdam stands to be among the largest forks Ethereum has ever delivered. He conceded that reaching this point has taken a matching amount of time, but argued the outcome will justify the wait. Still, this is a researcher’s pledge rather than a measured result, so the throughput claim is best viewed as a goal until mainnet data is available.
The technical changes behind the upgrade
Glamsterdam has three declared objectives: faster processing through parallelization, greater capacity, and preventing the database from swelling over time.
Most of that work falls to two features. Block-Level Access Lists (BALs), specified in EIP-7928, introduce parallel execution to Ethereum. The other headline feature, ePBS, overhauls the block validation pipeline and cuts down the trust assumptions built into it.
Ahead of the Sepolia date, testing continues on devnets. Glamsterdam is being positioned as a foundation for Ethereum’s next scaling phase, not as the final step on that path.
Buterin’s attention is already two forks out
In his most recent post, Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin bypassed Glamsterdam altogether, outlining what follows Hegota, the fork slated for next year.
“My attempt to express in somewhat concise terms the true meaning of basically everything planned to happen to Ethereum starting from the fork after Hegota. It’s really not just a blockchain anymore. It’s a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography, to enable much more powerful properties,” Buterin said.
Pointing to Strawman, the document containing Ethereum’s longer-term draft roadmap, Buterin said Hegota might likely be Ethereum’s last “normal” fork, meaning one whose features and technology would still look familiar to someone from 2015.
Beyond Hegota, cryptography leads the way
Every fork after that one will draw on recursive STARKs, automated formal verification and heavily optimized consensus algorithms, with the goal of making Ethereum quantum-safe. Buterin said the move from a plain blockchain toward something more capable started with PeerDAS, and that after Hegota this transformation becomes the central narrative for Ethereum.
The destination he describes is computation that is far cheaper, more scalable and more private, while retaining high security, than the technology of the previous era could achieve by itself. Buterin’s name for it is the cryptographic world computer.
That vision remains distant. The nearer milestone worth marking is Oct. 6, when Glamsterdam arrives on Sepolia and its parallelism promises face their first public test.