- Fusaka hard fork targeted for early November after two public testnets.
- Developers draft Glamsterdam roadmap, aiming for mainnet launch in 2026.
Ethereum core developers on Friday fixed a provisional early November window for Fusaka, the network’s next major hard fork and first since Pectra in May. The decision follows smooth runs on Holesky and Sepolia test environments earlier this month. Fusaka will refine data handling, raise the gas ceiling, and streamline validator duties. With that schedule in place, client teams have begun outlining Glamsterdam, the successor upgrade that is still in the concept phase.
What Fusaka brings to the network
Fusaka bundles eleven Ethereum Improvement Proposals. The headline change is EIP-7825, which introduces data availability sampling to lower overhead for rollups and improve layer two settlement speed. A separate proposal lifts the network gas limit to 150 million units, giving decentralised applications more headroom during peak usage. Validator operations will also change through EIP-7251, which increases the maximum effective balance per validator to 4,096 ether and reduces churn pressure on the consensus layer.
The rollout timetable is tight. A final devnet is scheduled to start next week, giving client teams one month to ship feature-complete releases. The Fusaka code will then move to public testnets in late September and October for broader stress tests, including a two-week bug bounty. If no critical issues arise, mainnet activation will land in the first half of November, a few days before the Devconnect gathering in Buenos Aires. Developers note that the date could still slip if cross-client consensus bugs appear.
Market participants tracking the upgrade see indirect benefits rather than immediate performance gains. By improving base layer data throughput and validator efficiency, Fusaka prepares the ground for more complex scaling work scheduled for 2026. Exchange nodes and institutional staking providers have already flagged the need for configuration updates, though no hardware changes are expected.
Early outline for Glamsterdam
With Fusaka locked in, the protocol steering group has turned to Glamsterdam. Early drafts suggest that Glamsterdam will centre on Verkle tree implementation, a switch that compresses state data and paves the way for stateless clients. Developers are also debating a reduction of block time from the current twelve seconds to six seconds, though the proposal remains contentious because of potential uncle rate hikes.
Glamsterdam’s specification freeze is pencilled in for the first quarter of 2026, with a mainnet target in the second half of the year. The window allows room for extensive security audits and for layer two teams to realign their roadmaps. Core contributors stress that Glamsterdam will proceed only after post-Fusaka monitoring confirms network stability. In the meantime, discussions will continue in AllCoreDevs calls and open repositories, giving stakeholders ample opportunity to shape the final feature set.
For Ethereum users the message is clear: November marks a steady, incremental improvement, while the larger engineering challenges lie ahead in Glamsterdam.
