Ethereum’s Glamsterdam test gets last-minute fix before major capacity jump
Ethereum developers are testing a major network upgrade called 'Glamsterdam' on the Sepolia testnet, which includes a significant increase in the block gas limit. By raising the limit from 60 million to 200 million, developers aim to evaluate the network's capacity to handle higher transaction volumes and more complex activity.
Why it matters
Increasing block capacity is a critical step for Ethereum to scale its throughput, potentially lowering transaction fees and supporting more decentralized applications in the future.
Glamsterdam is Ethereum's next major upgrade, and it activates first on Sepolia, a test network where developers rehearse changes using tokens with no real value. One part of Tuesday's test raises Sepolia's gas limit from about 60 million to 200 million.
Gas is the unit Ethereum uses to measure how much computing work fits into a block. A higher limit gives the network room to process more transactions and more complex activity at once, though it also asks more of the computers that run Ethereum.
Prysm, software used by Ethereum validators, released version 7.2.1 late Monday with the 200 million setting built in. Its previous release was finished before that setting was added to Sepolia's configuration, so validators running it would have stayed at 60 million unless operators changed the number by hand.
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