Ethereum's next hard fork now has a date for its first public test. Glamsterdam is scheduled to fork the Sepolia testnet on Oct. 6, 2026. Mainnet is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026, but there’s no official date yet.
That gap matters. A testnet date tells you the developers are confident enough to go public. It doesn’t tell you when your wallet, your node or the games you play on Ethereum will run on the new rules.
The researcher’s pitch is upbeat
Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, set the tone in a recent post on X. “Glamsterdam with EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) is approaching the final mile, and things look great,” Wahrstätter said.
He listed what he expects the fork to deliver: “Significant throughput increase thanks to parallelism,” “Faster and simpler sync via snap v2” and a design that is “Future-compatible with zkEVMs, partially stateful nodes, inclusion lists.”
Wahrstätter also said he believes Glamsterdam will be one of the biggest forks Ethereum has shipped. He acknowledged it has taken a correspondingly long time to get here, and said the result will be worth it. That’s a researcher’s promise, not a benchmark, so treat the throughput claim as a target until mainnet numbers exist.
What’s changing under the hood
The upgrade has three stated goals. It aims to speed up processing through parallelization, expand capacity and keep the database from bloating over time.
Two features carry most of that load. Block-Level Access Lists, or BALs, defined in EIP-7928, bring parallel execution to Ethereum. ePBS is the other headliner. It reworks the block validation pipeline and reduces the trust assumptions baked into it.
Testing is still running on devnets ahead of the Sepolia date. Glamsterdam is framed as groundwork for Ethereum’s next phase of scaling, and it isn’t the end of that road.
Buterin is already looking two forks ahead
Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has skipped past Glamsterdam entirely in his latest post, sketching what comes after Hegota, the fork planned for next year.
“My attempt to express in somewhat concise terms the true meaning of basically everything planned to happen to Ethereum starting from the fork after Hegota. It’s really not just a blockchain anymore. It’s a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography, to enable much more powerful properties,” Buterin said.
Citing Strawman, the document that holds Ethereum’s longer-range draft roadmap, Buterin said Hegota might likely be Ethereum’s last “normal” fork. By that he means one with features and technology that someone from 2015 would still recognize.
After Hegota, the cryptography takes over
Everything after that fork will involve recursive STARKs, automated formal verification and highly optimized consensus algorithms, with the aim of making Ethereum quantum-safe. Buterin said the shift from plain blockchain to something more powerful began with PeerDAS. After Hegota, he said, that transformation becomes Ethereum’s primary story.
His stated end point is computation that’s much cheaper, more scalable and more private, while keeping high security, than the previous era’s technology could manage alone. Buterin calls it the cryptographic world computer.
That’s a long way off. The date to put in your calendar is closer: Oct. 6, when Glamsterdam hits Sepolia and the parallelism claims get their first public test.
