Reading · Christine D. Kim

Good evening,

Today, Ethereum developers discussed dates for activating Glamsterdam on public testnets, starting with Sepolia, the most widely used Ethereum testnet by application developers.

However, these dates are still tentative, as developers have yet to activate Glamsterdam on a short-lived testnet successfully.

Below is my latest on what industry stakeholders need to know about the status of Ethereum development and protocol decision-making.

Yours truly,

Christine D. Kim

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On Glamsterdam progress, I have good news and bad news.

Bad news first. We still have yet to see a successful version of the Glamsterdam upgrade on test networks.

Developers had launched their 9th Glamsterdam testnet, Glamsterdam-devnet-8, last week.

Called “devnet” because most of these networks were private and called “8” because the networks were numbered starting from zero, in case you were wondering. You know me, I’m an over explainer. Anyways, this is besides the point.

The Glamsterdam upgrade on Devnet-8 caused the network to lose finality, think reduced network security and stability, after close to half of the validator set failed to process staked builder deposits.

Ethereum Foundation Developer Operations Engineer Barnabas Busa said on the latest All Core Developers (ACD) call, ACDC #185:

Major issue was that some clients [had a] bad implementation of caching builder deposits to process them during the fork transition. So, we saw this with Lighthouse, Prysm, and Teku. They all struggled to process the first slot right after we activated [Glamsterdam], because we had about 16,000 builder deposits queued up.

Client teams reported on the call that the issue has already been fixed in their implementations.

However, due to the instability of Devnet-8 through the upgrade activation, the setup of application developers and other network stakeholders that had joined the devnet to test their infrastructure were disrupted.

Dmitry Gusakov, Head of Engineer at Lido, Ethereum’s largest liquid staking service by total ETH under management, requested a re-do of the upgrade on another testnet before developers begin upgrading public Ethereum testnets.

Ethereum Foundation Developer Operations Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi, who was also chairing this week’s developer meeting, assured Gusakov that he and other development teams will get another opportunity to test their setups on next week’s non-finality testnet.

Fingers crossed, this one goes over smoothly. If it does, it’ll be the first and taken as the green light for developers to move on to upgrading Ethereum’s public testnets.

Speaking of public testnet upgrades, the good news is that developers remain optimistic about the timeline for these.

Jayanthi proposed on ACDC #185 a tentative upgrade schedule that would activate Glamsterdam on Sepolia on Monday, September 28 and then on Hoodi on Monday, October 26.

Gusakov pushed back on these dates, requesting more time for application developers to prepare for public testnet upgrades, which Jayanthi was agreeable to. Thus, the actual upgrade schedule may place the first public testnet upgrade on Sepolia sometime in early October, rather than late September.

In either case, developers are getting close to finalizing Glamsterdam and have already thrown out a few proposed dates for the public testnet upgrades.

On progress for the Hegota upgrade, developers have closed the window for proposing features. As I shared last week, developers are now evaluating a list of roughly 66 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and selecting a subset of these to include in Hegota.

This time around, developers are leaning heavily on Forkcast, a website for tracking Ethereum upgrades, to rank their preferences on Hegota EIPs.

If you haven’t seen Forkcast’s ranking tool already, here’s what it look like:

Essentially, developers can drag and drop the EIPs they would like to see in Hegota on the Forkcast rankings card by priority, “S” being the highest priority to “C” being the lowest priority and “DFI” being proposals that shouldn’t even be considered for inclusion, but rather “declined for inclusion” in the upgrade.

Already, several Ethereum community members have ranked their preferences and shared screenshots of their rankings on X and other forums. EthLabs shared theirs last week, along with a blog post explaining their rationale for the selection.

While everyone is welcome and encouraged to share their Hegota rankings, including non-protocol developers in the community, the decision-making for which EIPs make into the upgrade will be based primarily on the rankings of the clients teams.

Jayanthi said on the call:

The way we would want to start is go with the obvious DFI and obvious CFI options, so if every client team agrees on an EIP or disagrees on an EIP, let's get that out of the way first. And once that's done, I think we start the long tail of, actually going through rough consensus and coming up with what the EIPs were actually going to SFI in the end.

Now, Jayanthi isn’t saying that the opinions of non-client teams are pointless in the process. The views of teams like EthLabs and others in the community who do not directly build Ethereum client software do matter, but the final vote will rest with the seven consensus layer clients and five execution layer clients, six if you count Ethrex, whose job it is to actually code, test, and release the features included in Hegota.

No matter what stakeholders want, if the client teams don’t build it, there is no upgrade.

To this end, stakeholders in the community who have strong opinion about what should be included in Hegota should primarily voice their rankings to client teams in order for their views to be heard in the governance process. That, or build your own Ethereum client and earn your seat at the table to directly influence protocol development.

The rough consensus formed by client teams is the driving force that shapes the scope of Ethereum upgrades, which is why a diversity of client teams is a particularly important line of defense against protocol capture.

Convincing one or two clients teams about your views on the Hegota rankings or building your own client and having a direct vote on the ACD calls does not translate to an immediate victory, i.e., control over Ethereum.

There are more than a dozen different teams building Ethereum. The rough consensus formed between all of these teams is what drives Ethereum development forward, and nothing less.

Prior week’s answer: 200 million.

All Core Developers Consensus #185 call summary and transcript (Forkcast).
List of all EIPs proposed for inclusion in Hegota (Ethereum.org). For the finalized Glamsterdam EIP list, recently updated with the removal of EIP 7610, refer to this Google spreadsheet.
Vitalik Buterin credits Bitcoin developers for pioneering Ethereum developers’ ideas about blockchain scaling (X).
President Donald Trump says regulators are working to make trading on Hyperliquid, a blockchain for high-speed perpetual futures trading, legal and compliant in the U.S (The Defiant).
Trump also urges Congress to pass the Clarity Act, a crypto market structure bill that would establish a broad regulatory framework to oversee the crypto industry and blockchain-based services and product. (CNBC)
Partnering Securitize, U.S.-based asset management firm Neuberger Berman launches a tokenized high-yield fixed income fund across four blockchains: Sui, Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana. (PR Newswire)

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The Hegota tier rankings that matter most

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