Ethereum delays Glamsterdam to Q4 2026, sets Hegotá deadline

Ethereum developers moved the Glamsterdam upgrade to the fourth quarter of 2026 and launched a new public testnet named Platåberget. Work is underway to reduce the field of proposals for Hegotá, the upgrade expected to follow, with a compressed schedule to keep a 2027 release possible.

Platåberget began after Glamsterdam slipped from an earlier target of the first half of 2026. The testnet is intended to run for several months before upgrades advance to the longer-lived Sepolia and Hoodi testnets. It is designed to give developers and users a more stable environment than short-lived developer networks for testing post-Glamsterdam behavior and finding bugs before any mainnet activation.

Developers flagged breaking changes in Glamsterdam that will require updates to tooling. Applications and services that rely on a hardcoded maximum gas limit — including some wallets, indexers and gas estimators — must update their software to work correctly after the upgrade. The extended Platåberget testing period aims to surface those issues so teams can prepare fixes.

Planning for Hegotá is already under way. Ethereum researcher Toni Wahrstätter reported that 66 proposed EIPs are under review for Hegotá. The All Core Devs agenda from Aug. 13 set a tight timetable: maintainers have about two weeks to trim the proposed-for-inclusion list, expected to be finalized around Aug. 27, and client teams have until Sept. 10 to submit preference lists.

FOCIL, EIP-7805, is the confirmed consensus-layer headline for Hegotá. Frame Transactions, EIP-8141, remains under consideration, and developers are weighing a range of execution-layer changes alongside privacy, scaling, validator and EVM proposals. Wahrstätter argued that Frame Transactions should be considered together with Keyed Nonces, EIP-8250, and Recent Roots, EIP-8272, to give privacy-focused applications additional native protocol tools.

FOCIL is intended to improve censorship resistance by allowing committees of validators to require inclusion of certain transactions in blocks, reducing the ability of specialized builders to exclude valid transactions. Frame Transactions would split parts of validation, execution and fee payment inside a transaction to allow more flexible account behavior. Keyed Nonces would permit independent nonce domains, and Recent Roots would let transactions reference recently verified state roots.

Scaling proposals are also competing for limited implementation capacity. Candidates under consideration include EIP-8131 and EIP-8279 to reprice transaction and block data, EIP-8368 to address state-growth costs, and Quick Slots, EIP-8198, to shorten slot times and speed settlement. Other topics in play include EVM simplifications, changes to ETH issuance and validator penalties, and early zkEVM and post-quantum proposals.

Ethlabs, an independent research lab backed by BitMine, SharpLink and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, has advocated for Quick Slots, FOCIL and Frame Transactions. The lab recommended keeping Hegotá tightly scoped with a focus on execution-layer changes and a light consensus-layer agenda beyond FOCIL and Quick Slots. Ethlabs advised applying a high bar to additional execution-layer EIPs and suggested rejecting several proposals for Hegotá, including EIP-8375, an MEV-related burn mechanism, and EIP-8182, which would enable private ETH and ERC-20 transfers.

Developers noted that implementing a large number of proposals would increase implementation and testing demands. The compressed timetable for narrowing Hegotá’s EIPs is intended to define a manageable set of changes so client teams can build, test and coordinate before Glamsterdam moves toward mainnet activation.