Tonight at 21:53 Beijing time, Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, goes live on the Sepolia testnet.

The most interesting part isn’t the upgrade itself, but that Prysm rushed out a patch just hours before the test began.

1️⃣ What happened?

According to CoinDesk and Prysm’s official release notes: In Sepolia’s Glamsterdam configuration, the block gas limit is set to jump from around 60 million straight to 200 million. But this setting was only added to the upstream configuration on September 24, after Prysm 7.2.0 had already been released, so it wasn’t included.

The result: Validators running 7.2.0 will keep producing blocks with a 60-million gas limit after the fork unless they change the setting manually.

On Monday evening, Prysm released 7.2.1, with the 200 million gas schedule built right in.

2️⃣ Why this matters

There’s just one core question this test aims to answer: Can validators reliably handle blocks with more than 3× the capacity?

If some nodes are still producing small, 60-million-gas blocks, the stress-test data will be skewed. It’s like finding out before an exam that some people have an old version of the test.

3️⃣ Timeline

The EF’s official blog makes it clear: Sepolia activation is scheduled for Oct 6 at 13:53:36 UTC (epoch 353,024). Dates for Hoodi and mainnet are still TBD. This test will also introduce new validator duties related to ePBS.

My take:

Ethereum has talked a lot about scaling L1 over the past two years. What really matters is a live test like this—pushing the gas limit to the maximum and seeing whether nodes can handle it. If it runs smoothly, Ethereum will have more confidence when discussing larger blocks on mainnet. If problems arise, it’s a million times cheaper to deal with them now than to have things go wrong on mainnet.

Note: 200 million gas applies only to Sepolia. Glamsterdam has not been activated on mainnet, and no date has been set. If you see a headline saying “Ethereum throughput has tripled,” take a moment before jumping to conclusions.

If you run a Sepolia validator, check your version—or set the gas_limit manually.

$ETH

Sources: CoinDesk (10/6), Ethereum Foundation Blog (9/17 Glamsterdam Testnet Announcement), and Prysm v7.2.0/7.2.1 release notes.

This is not investment advice.