Ethereum's Glamsterdam hits Hoodi testnet Oct. 27 KST, gas limit to rise to 200M

Ethereum's next network upgrade, Glamsterdam, is moving to its second public testnet, Hoodi. The Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Cluster said in a blog post on Oct. 16 that the upgrade will activate on Hoodi at 17:42:48 UTC on Oct. 26 (2:42:48 a.m. KST on Oct. 27), at epoch 132,352. Hoodi's block gas limit will rise to 200 million at the same epoch.

Twenty days after Sepolia, the mainnet row still reads TBD

Glamsterdam went live first on Sepolia, the first public testnet, on Oct. 6. The deployment schedule published in the new announcement is below. Testnets are trial networks where no real money changes hands.

"This announcement covers Hoodi; it does not schedule a mainnet upgrade," the foundation wrote. It said the mainnet activation time will be announced separately once client teams decide on it. The previous upgrade, Fusaka, went through several testnets before activating on mainnet on Dec. 4, 2025, KST. The foundation advised application and tooling developers to test gas estimation and contract behavior on Sepolia and Hoodi after activation.

Testnet blocks get more than three times the room

Gas measures the computation needed to process transactions and smart contracts, and the block gas limit caps how much computation a single block can hold. The foundation said Hoodi's limit will be raised to 200 million under the gas limit schedule (EIP-8261), matching Sepolia. As of 7:30 a.m. KST on Oct. 18, the latest blocks showed gas limits of 200 million on Sepolia, 60 million on Hoodi and 60 million on mainnet. At that time, the latest Sepolia block used about 78 million gas, filling roughly 40% of the limit. The Hoodi change leaves the mainnet limit untouched, and the announcement does not say what the mainnet limit will be.

The foundation named enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS, EIP-7732), which builds the split between block proposers and builders into the protocol, and block-level access lists (BALs, EIP-7928), which record the accounts and storage a block touches, as Glamsterdam's headline changes. BALs let clients read state and validate transactions in parallel. "Together, ePBS and BALs provide a foundation for scaling execution capacity while keeping block validation practical for node operators," the foundation said. The upgrade also reprices gas, including EIP-8037, which raises the cost of creating state, and the foundation said contracts that hardcode gas values may need changes. The 18 scheduled core EIPs also include ETH transfer logs (EIP-7708), a slot-number opcode (EIP-7843), a higher maximum contract size (EIP-7954) and increased exit and consolidation churn (EIP-8061). The foundation said Glamsterdam's specifications and EIPs are covered by the Ethereum Bug Bounty Program, and client implementations become eligible once their releases are added to the release tables.

Geth and Lighthouse versions are still blank

Hoodi node operators must update both their execution and consensus layer clients before activation, and stakers must update both their beacon node and validator client. At the time of the announcement, the foundation's tables listed Hoodi-compatible releases for consensus clients Lodestar 1.50.0, Nimbus 26.10.1, Prysm 7.3.0 and Teku 26.10.1, and execution clients Besu 26.10.0, Ethrex 30.0.0-rc.2 and Nethermind 2.2.0. The version fields for go-ethereum (Geth), Erigon, Reth, Lighthouse and Grandine were empty, and the foundation said the tables will be updated as releases are confirmed. It told operators to use only releases whose notes explicitly confirm support for the Hoodi activation.

The foundation said mainnet users and ETH holders do not need to do anything as a result of the announcement. As of 7:31 a.m. KST on Oct. 18, ETH traded at 3,236,000 won on Upbit and $2,388 on Binance, putting the Upbit price 1.5% above Binance's won-converted price, a gap known as the kimchi premium (the difference between prices on Korean exchanges and global markets).