Ethereum developers have begun a public rehearsal of the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Sepolia test network, lifting the chain’s processing budget to nearly 200 million gas per block from roughly 60 million. The test is designed to examine changes meant to give the network more room to handle payments and trades.

Early results from Sepolia suggest the larger block budget is not yet being fully used. Initial blocks consumed about 26% to 46% of available capacity, while a six-minute voting window produced every scheduled block and reached finality with 99.97% of eligible stake taking part.

A much larger processing limit

The main visible change in the Sepolia rehearsal is the sharp increase in the amount of computation a block can carry. Moving from around 60 million gas to almost 200 million gives developers a public environment to observe how Ethereum behaves with a processing limit more than three times higher than before.

That expansion is tied to Glamsterdam’s broader goal of making more space for on-chain activity. In practical terms, the work is aimed at improving Ethereum’s ability to accommodate a greater volume of transfers and trading activity without presenting the test as a final mainnet decision.

How Glamsterdam changes block handling

The upgrade changes the way Ethereum’s computers split responsibilities when blocks are built and published. It formalizes within the protocol the handoff between the parties that assemble transactions and the validators that publish blocks, a change intended to give validators more time to verify transaction calculations.

Glamsterdam also adds a list to each block showing which accounts and pieces of stored data are touched by its transactions. Client software can use that information to retrieve needed data in advance and to check unrelated transactions in parallel, rather than processing everything strictly one step at a time.

Capacity gains come with technical trade-offs

Even if the changes create more room for activity, higher throughput can place extra demands on the computers that run Ethereum. The upgrade therefore also revises the gas charges tied to creating and accessing stored data.

Because of those pricing adjustments, developers have been asked to retest applications that rely on specific gas-cost assumptions. That makes the current test phase important not just for the core protocol, but also for software that may behave differently once those costs are altered.

Next testnet step remains tentative

Sepolia is not the final stop in the rollout. The next public test network, Hoodi, is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 27, but that timing depends on the outcome of the current Sepolia exercise.

No activation date has been set for Ethereum mainnet. For now, the confirmed next step is continued observation of Sepolia’s results, followed by a possible Hoodi test if developers are satisfied with how the upgrade performs under public rehearsal.

Source: www.coindesk.com