Ethereum sets Glamsterdam for Sepolia testnet on Oct. 6, but no mainnet date; ETH steady near $2,690

Ethereum developers have scheduled Glamsterdam, the network's next major upgrade, to go live on the Sepolia test network on October 6 at 13:53:36 UTC, the Ethereum Foundation said. Dates for the Hoodi testnet and for Ethereum's main network have not been set. Cointelegraph reported the schedule on Tuesday.

Ether was little changed on the news. It traded at $2,691.53 on Coinbase late Tuesday, up 0.4% from the day's open, down about 2.2% from a week earlier and up about 11% from a month ago, based on Coinbase daily candles.

What the headline gets wrong

A testnet date is not a launch date. Sepolia is a practice network where client software and applications are tested before real money moves onto new rules. The foundation's own notice is blunt: it "does not schedule a mainnet upgrade", and mainnet users and ETH holders need to take no action. A separate announcement will cover mainnet. Anyone reading "Ethereum upgrade October 6" as the date the live network changes has it wrong.

What is actually changing

Glamsterdam packages 18 scheduled changes. The two headline items are:

• Enshrined proposer-builder separation (EIP-7732). Today, most Ethereum blocks are assembled by specialist builders and passed to validators through outside relay software. The upgrade moves that handoff, and the payment to the proposer, into the protocol itself, reducing reliance on trusted middleware.
• Block-level access lists (EIP-7928). Each block will record which accounts and storage slots it touches, so node software can read state and check transactions in parallel. That is groundwork for raising how much the network can process.

The notice also points to scale: the Prysm validator client "defaults to a 60M gas limit after activation", and validators who want to propose with a 200M gas limit have to configure it explicitly.

Who it actually hits: anyone with a hardcoded gas number

The part with real consequences for businesses is the gas repricing. EIP-8037 raises and separately meters the cost of creating new state, EIP-8038 updates the cost of reading it, and further changes touch calldata, access lists and the base cost of a transaction. The foundation warns that contracts relying on "fixed gas stipends, hardcoded gas limits, or assumptions about remaining gas may need changes".

That is a concrete to-do list for a narrow group: teams running payment contracts, token issuers, wallets that estimate fees, and exchanges or DeFi protocols with older contracts that pass a fixed amount of gas to another contract. The Sepolia window is when those assumptions get tested, and the foundation has published a repricing impact guide for finding affected contracts. For ordinary holders, the change arrives only when mainnet is scheduled.

The upgrade after this one, called Hegotá, is being targeted for 2027, Cointelegraph reported. Live prices are on our crypto prices page.

Sources: Ethereum Foundation; Cointelegraph; Coinbase Exchange ETH-USD data. This is market information, not investment advice.