Ethereum’s next hard fork has quietly moved into its final pre-launch stretch. Developers are now testing all planned upgrades for Glamsterdam across multi-client devnets, the last major checkpoint before the upgrade hits public testnets.
That process, which kicked off at the Soldøgn interoperability event in early May 2026, has produced stable multi-client devnets. The wrapping of enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) testing was largely complete by the end of May.
What Glamsterdam actually changes
The upgrade carries two headline features. The first is ePBS, tracked as EIP-7732, which bakes proposer-builder separation directly into the protocol rather than relying on out-of-protocol solutions like MEV-Boost. Right now, the system that decides which transactions go into a block and in what order depends on third-party relay infrastructure. Glamsterdam moves that logic on-chain, reducing trust assumptions and making the block production pipeline more transparent.
The second marquee change is EIP-7928, which introduces block-level access lists. These allow blocks to declare upfront which parts of Ethereum’s state they intend to touch, laying the groundwork for parallel execution, where multiple transactions can be processed simultaneously instead of one by one. The upgrade doesn’t flip on full parallel execution itself, but it builds the scaffolding.
