Ethereum-themed background for a story about the Glamsterdam protocol upgrade.

Ethereum’s Glamsterdam Hits the Devnet Stage With Its Full Upgrade Bundle

By Isaac • June 16, 2026 2:19 pm • Comments

Ethereum’s next major protocol upgrade just moved from roadmap talk into real code on test networks.

Developers have entered the final development phase of Glamsterdam, with devnets now running the planned set of upgrades before public testnets.

Ethereum ranked second by market capitalization during the June 16, 2026 CoinGecko selection check, behind Bitcoin and ahead of Tether, BNB, XRP, USDC, Solana, TRON, Figure Heloc, and Hyperliquid. That makes any major change to its base protocol broad infrastructure news for the whole market.

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CoinDesk reported on June 16 that the work is now in its last build phase, with devnets running the full EIP suite ahead of public testnet deployment.

Ethereum Foundation developer Parithosh Jayanthi described the effort as the last stage before hardening the upgrade and shipping testnets.

there is no fixed mainnet timeline. The upgrade is expected in the second half of 2026, and that window is an expectation rather than a locked activation date.

The bundle itself is defined in the meta spec.

The Ethereum EIPs page for EIP-7773 lists the scheduled execution-layer proposals for Glamsterdam. It is the master list developers are building against.

The headline change is EIP-7732, enshrined proposer-builder separation. It bakes the split between block proposers and block builders directly into the protocol instead of leaving it to outside software.

EIP-7928 adds block-level access lists, which lay out ahead of time what state a block will touch. That sets up parallel execution and faster validation down the line.

EIP-7778 changes block gas accounting by removing refunds, which cleans up how gas usage is measured at the block level.

EIP-7708 adds ETH transfer logs, giving plain ETH transfers the same kind of on-chain event records that token transfers already produce. That makes tracing value movement easier for wallets, explorers, and apps.

The scheduled list also includes execution-layer cost and contract-size adjustments, the kind of tuning that shifts what is cheap and what is expensive for builders to do on chain.

Process context comes from the core developer calls.

The Ethereum Magicians summary of All Core Devs Execution #238 covered Glamsterdam devnet updates, including DevNet 5 status and planning for DevNet 6.

That summary also referenced additional EIPs under consideration for the next devnet cycle, including 8038, 2780, 8246, and 7997. Those are candidates in the pipeline, not confirmed parts of the shipped fork.

The practical read here is straightforward. Glamsterdam is no longer a wish list.

It is a defined set of changes running on test networks, with the proposer-builder separation work and block-level access lists at the center.

What comes next is hardening and public testnets, where the bundle gets stress-tested before anyone sets a mainnet date.

For Ethereum holders and builders, this is the cycle that defines the next stretch of how the network produces and accounts for blocks. The devnet phase is where that gets proven out, and the clock toward a second-half-2026 target starts ticking in earnest.

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