Hoodi Testnet Sets Activation for Oct 26 With 200 Million Gas Limit

Hoodi Activation Pinned to Slot 4,235,264

Node operators running a Hoodi testnet node now have a fixed deadline to meet. The Ethereum Foundation announced on Friday, October 16 that the Glamsterdam upgrade will activate on Hoodi at 17:42:48 UTC on October 26, which corresponds to 02:42:48 Korea Standard Time the following morning. Activation is pinned to epoch 132,352 and slot 4,235,264, the fork boundary the proof-of-stake chain will cross at exactly that time. From that slot forward, Hoodi's gas limit rises to 200 million gas, the ceiling that governs per-block gas fees.

The Foundation's notice carries a direct duty for anyone operating on Hoodi: before that boundary arrives, both the execution-layer client and the consensus-layer client must be upgraded to versions compatible with Glamsterdam. A node left on an older release after slot 4,235,264 would follow a different rule set from the rest of the network and fall out of consensus. The Foundation said it will publish and refresh a list of compatible client versions as teams ship them, and it advised operators to re-check that list rather than assume a previously downloaded release still qualifies.

Hoodi is the second public rehearsal for this fork. Sepolia activated Glamsterdam on Tuesday, October 6, and the Foundation's announcement converts an earlier tentative Hoodi date of October 27 into a fixed epoch and slot. The Foundation also drew a line around the gas figure: 200 million is a Hoodi configuration, and it does not mean the mainnet gas limit will move to the same level. Whether mainnet adopts a comparable ceiling, and when Glamsterdam reaches mainnet at all, will be announced separately.

ePBS and Block Access Lists

Glamsterdam is a paired name. Amsterdam is the execution-layer upgrade and Gloas is the consensus-layer upgrade, and the fork ships them together under one label. The combined change reworks how blocks on Ethereum's base layer, the chain that Layer 2 networks settle onto, are produced, validated and processed, with the stated aim of preparing scaling at layer 1 itself.

Two components carry most of the weight. ePBS brings the roles of block proposer and block builder into the protocol itself, so the party that proposes a block and the party that fills it are separated by protocol rules rather than by off-chain arrangement. Block-level access lists, known as BAL, record which accounts and storage locations a block touches and which state changes result. With state access declared in advance, execution clients gain the foundation for processing transactions in parallel instead of sequentially, which is the precondition for lifting throughput on the base layer.

Ethereum's official roadmap currently points Glamsterdam's mainnet activation at the fourth quarter of 2026 while marking the specific date as undetermined, and the entry makes no mainnet gas-limit commitment either. That leaves the schedule in two parts: a fixed, announced testnet epoch, and a mainnet fork that exists only as a quarterly window until the Foundation names a day. Mainnet operators face the same dual-client upgrade Hoodi is rehearsing, but they do not yet have a deadline attached to it.

Our read is that the Hoodi epoch is the scheduling hinge for the mainnet fork. Client teams have historically announced mainnet dates only after a final public testnet runs cleanly, and the Foundation now has a fixed, epoch-pinned activation on its second testnet within a three-week span. The structural piece is ePBS, which moves the proposer-builder relationship into the protocol; the performance piece is BAL, which declares state access per block so execution can eventually run concurrently. The last upgrade of comparable structural depth for the network was Ethereum's move from 1.0 to 2.0, which changed how the chain reaches consensus; Glamsterdam changes how its blocks are built. What remains outstanding is narrow: the Foundation still owes a completed list of compatible client versions, and it still owes a mainnet date inside the stated Q4 2026 window.