Ethereum’s Glamsterdam Upgrade Enshrines Proposer-Builder Separation on Hoodi Testnet October 26

Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade will bring proposer-builder separation into the protocol itself when it activates on the Hoodi testnet at epoch 132,352 on October 26, 2026, the Ethereum Foundation announced on October 16.

What EIP-7732 changes

EIP-7732, the upgrade's headline inclusion, writes the split between block proposers and block builders directly into Ethereum's consensus rules. Today that separation exists only as an out-of-protocol market: a validator proposes a block, specialized builders compete to fill it, and the handoff between the two runs on trusted intermediaries and side agreements that Ethereum itself does not guarantee.

Under the enshrined design, the protocol takes over that handoff. A payload timeliness committee attests to whether a builder revealed its block payload and blob data on time, so the network itself verifies that the promised block actually arrived, and when.

Glamsterdam is the combined name for two upgrades landing at the same fork: Amsterdam, the execution layer change named after the Devconnect 2022 host city, and Gloas, the consensus layer change named under the protocol's star-naming convention. EIP-7732 sits on the consensus side.

The wider package

Proposer-builder separation is the largest of 19 EIPs scheduled for inclusion, tracked by EIP-7773, along with 7 supporting networking and informational EIPs. EIP-7928 adds enforced block-level access lists, a per-block record of the accounts and storage locations a block touched, together with the resulting state changes. That per-block record of every account and storage slot touched is what lets the protocol price state access explicitly.

The package also carries smaller quality-of-life changes: logs for ETH transfers, an opcode that returns the current slot, a raised cap on contract size, a factory contract whose address is predictable, and extra instructions for stack manipulation.

What it means for validators and builders

For validators, enshrined PBS replaces the current trust-based arrangement with a protocol commitment: the committee's attestation becomes the check on whether a builder delivered. For builders, the rules of engagement move from off-chain deals to consensus-level requirements. For users, the change strengthens censorship resistance, because the network no longer depends on intermediaries outside the protocol to connect those who order transactions with those who build blocks.

Hoodi's gas limit will also rise to 200M at the activation epoch, and every client on both the execution and consensus sides needs an update before the fork. The Ethereum Bug Bounty Program remains active for the Glamsterdam specifications and EIPs.

Glamsterdam already activated on Sepolia on October 6. No date for the mainnet fork has been chosen yet.

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