Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade just cleared key tests this week, paving the way for deployment on the Sepolia public testnet on October 6.
The impressive numbers:
Nethermind, one of Ethereum's clients completed a performance test with striking results: processing 570.7 billion gas in 3 minutes 15 seconds, averaging 2.9 billion gas per second. All 2,302 tests passed.
What's behind this number?
The test evaluated the block-level access list mechanism one of Glamsterdam's biggest changes. This mechanism pre-notifies nodes which accounts and storage keys a block will use, allowing unrelated transactions to be loaded and checked in parallel instead of sequentially.
Result: Ethereum can pack more activity into each block.
After testnet deployment:
Block gas limit will rise from 60 million to 200 million, over 3x
Goal: absorb extra activity before users bid for block space, slowing fee spikes
But there's a price:
Bigger blocks mean propagation time increases from ~2 seconds to ~9 seconds. This could make it harder for smaller nodes to keep up a potential risk to decentralization.
Glamsterdam also plans to bring the transfer and settlement between block building and block verification into Ethereum's rules, reducing reliance on external intermediaries.
Expert take:
This is an important step, but it raises an old question Ethereum always faces: the trade-off between performance and decentralization.
Raising the block gas limit to 200 million is a big jump. It addresses high fees in the short term but at the cost of higher hardware requirements for nodes. If only powerful nodes can keep up, the network gradually centralizes.
What's notable is that Glamsterdam isn't just about "raising the gas limit." Bringing the builder-validator transfer mechanism into Ethereum's rules is a strategic move to reduce reliance on external relays one of Ethereum's current centralization points.
The real question is: Can Ethereum maintain the balance between scaling and decentralization? Glamsterdam will be the real-world test for that.
What do you think is raising the gas limit to 200 million the right move, or will it push smaller nodes out of the network?
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