Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade is scheduled to reach the Hoodi testnet on October 26, 2026, at 17:42:48 UTC, according to the Ethereum Foundation's October 16 announcement.
The activation follows Sepolia's October 6 upgrade.
As of October 19, the Foundation has not announced a mainnet activation date.
For teams running Hoodi infrastructure, the immediate job is preparation.
The announcement requires compatible execution and consensus clients, with both the beacon node and validator client updated for staking setups.
Operators should use releases whose notes explicitly confirm support for this particular Hoodi activation.
What changes in block production
Enshrined proposer-builder separation, or ePBS, moves the exchange between block proposers and builders into Ethereum's consensus protocol.
EIP-7732 separates consensus validation from execution validation, rather than requiring validators to finish both together on the same tight schedule.
Under the proposal, a builder commits to an execution payload before revealing it.
The protocol introduces builder-specific machinery and a validator duty for attesting to payload timeliness.
The intended benefit is a fair exchange between proposer and builder without relying on trusted middleware to complete that exchange.
That is a change in responsibilities, not simply a faster version of the old workflow. Our reading is that infrastructure teams should treat builder integration and validator duties as separate acceptance checks. A running client process alone is insufficient evidence that an entire operational setup is ready.
Why access lists matter to node software
The second major component, EIP-7928, introduces block-level access lists.
These record the accounts and storage locations touched during execution, alongside resulting state values.
The specification describes parallel disk reads, transaction validation and state-root computation as uses for that information.
The distinction from optional transaction access lists matters: the proposal makes the block-level information enforced.
Its motivation explains that execution cannot be parallelized without knowing in advance which addresses and storage slots transactions will access.
For readers assessing scaling claims, this provides a concrete mechanism to examine. It does not provide a universal speedup figure. Performance comparisons still need measurements on a stated CPU, storage device and node configuration.
Gas repricing deserves its own test plan
The Foundation's August 24 compatibility guide identifies a different risk: existing contracts can depend on gas assumptions that the upgrade changes.
EIP-8037 adjusts state-creation costs and separate metering, while EIP-8038 changes state-access pricing.
The teams behind that guide replayed historical mainnet transactions under the revised schedule.
They report that the large majority were unaffected and that many flagged failures could be addressed by increasing supplied gas limits.
Some contracts, however, still failed with substantially higher limits.
The guide points to fixed stipends, hardcoded call gas, branching on remaining gas and presigned transactions with fixed limits as areas to inspect.
It also directs wallet, RPC and tooling developers to update gas estimation rather than rely on cached constants.
Our practical interpretation is to distinguish a transaction-budget problem from a contract-logic problem. If more supplied gas restores execution, a frontend or infrastructure change may be sufficient. If it does not, increasing the limit repeatedly is not a substitute for reviewing the failing call path. Test each category separately and retain the result rather than recording only that a transaction succeeded once.
What to do before October 26
Hoodi's activation is scheduled for epoch 132,352, with its gas limit rising to 200 million at that epoch.
The Foundation says client tables will be updated as releases are confirmed, so operators should revisit the live announcement rather than rely on a copied version list.
Use the testnet milestone to check the complete system you actually operate: compatible clients, validator duties, builder interfaces where relevant, and application behavior under the repricing rules.
Mainnet users should not confuse this with an instruction to move assets.
The Foundation explicitly says this announcement concerns Hoodi and that a separate announcement will cover mainnet activation.