Marketing Communication

Two Upgrades to Watch: Ethereum's Glamsterdam and Solana's Alpenglow

24 September 2026

Menno Martens

Crypto Specialist and Product Manager

Two of the largest smart-contract networks are rolling out significant protocol upgrades in the second half of 2026. Ethereum’s Glamsterdam and Solana’s Alpenglow take different routes (one reworks how blocks are built and executed, the other replaces the consensus engine outright), but both are aimed at the same goal: making their networks faster and more reliable for real-world, institutional-scale use.

Ethereum: Glamsterdam

Glamsterdam is Ethereum’s next hard fork, following Pectra and the December 2025 Fusaka upgrade. Its name, in the network’s tradition, pairs a consensus-layer codename (Gloas, after a star) with an execution-layer codename (Amsterdam, after a past developer-conference host city).

The upgrade marks a deliberate shift back toward improving Ethereum’s base layer (Layer 1), after several upgrades focused primarily on scaling through rollups. Two “headliner” proposals anchor it:

EIP-7732: Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS). This builds the separation of block proposing from block building directly into the protocol, replacing today’s reliance on external relays. The intended benefits are fairer block production and a cleaner approach to the value validators can extract from ordering transactions.
EIP-7928: Block-Level Access Lists (BALs). By declaring in advance which parts of the network’s state a block will touch, BALs pave the way for parallel transaction execution, a prerequisite for meaningfully higher throughput on Layer 1.

Together with a set of supporting proposals (covering gas repricing, larger smart-contract size limits, and other efficiency measures), the upgrade is designed to lift Layer 1 capacity, clearing the path toward a gas limit of around 200 million per block, roughly triple today’s level, while keeping the network accessible to ordinary node operators, all within Ethereum’s roughly 12-second block slot.

Glamsterdam was originally floated for the first half of 2026, with an aspirational June target. As the scope and cross-client complexity became clearer, the timeline moved into the second half of the year. The upgrade reached its final devnet stage in June and is now moving to public testnets: activation on the Sepolia testnet is scheduled for 6 October, followed by a tentative Hoodi testnet fork on 27 October, subject to how Sepolia performs. Ethereum’s roadmap designates Glamsterdam for Q4 2026, but no mainnet date has been set. Ethereum has a long history of major upgrades slipping, and final client readiness and public-testnet results will determine activation. The next upgrade, Hegótá, is already being scoped for 2027.

What holders need to do: nothing. Stakers and node operators will need to update client software ahead of activation.

Solana: Alpenglow

Alpenglow is being described by its lead developers as the most significant consensus change in Solana’s history, an unusually strong claim. It is designed to replace two of Solana’s foundational mechanisms:

Tower BFT gives way to Votor, a new, faster voting and finality protocol. Votor is the part being activated first.
Turbine, Solana’s block-propagation layer, is to be replaced by Rotor, an optimised successor. Rotor is a later, separate proposal and is not part of the initial mainnet activation.

The most consequential change is that validator votes move off-chain, exchanged directly between validators, with only the outcome recorded on-chain. Today, those on-chain votes consume roughly three-quarters of Solana’s block space, capacity the network spends, in effect, talking to itself. Removing them frees that space for actual user transactions and reduces a major cost of running a validator. The network also becomes more resilient: finality can continue with up to 40% of stake unresponsive or adversarial, up from one-third today.

The headline result is finality: the time for a transaction to become irreversible is targeted to fall from roughly 12.8 seconds to around 150 milliseconds, on the order of an 85-fold improvement, faster than a typical card authorisation. In testing, the large majority of transactions have reached finality in a little over 200 milliseconds. For applications that depend on deterministic, near-instant settlement, that is a meaningful step.

The change cleared Solana’s validator governance in September 2025 with about 98% approval, an unusually strong mandate. After more than four months of trials on a dedicated community test cluster from May 2026, preparatory changes activated on mainnet over the summer, and the Agave v4.3 client carrying the Alpenglow code (in an inactive state) has been running on mainnet since 18 September. Alpenglow went live on Solana’s public testnet on 22 September, and feature activation on mainnet is scheduled to begin on 28 September, taking effect at epoch boundaries. As with any upgrade of this scale, the first weeks of live operation will be the real test.

What holders need to do: nothing. Validators will need to run the required client version before activation.

The Bigger Picture

The two upgrades illustrate the different design philosophies of the networks. Glamsterdam works within Ethereum’s existing consensus to squeeze more execution throughput out of each slot and to formalise fairer block production. Alpenglow rewrites Solana’s consensus from the ground up to chase near-instant finality and higher effective capacity.

For investors, the significance is less about short-term price and more about maturation. Both projects are targeting the same properties (speed, predictability, reliability under load) that institutions require before they will build on, or settle real value across, a public blockchain. Execution risk remains: upgrades of this scale can slip or surface issues in testing, which is precisely why Ethereum’s mainnet timeline remains a moving target, and why Solana’s early weeks on the new consensus will be closely watched. But the direction is consistent, and both networks sit within the digital-asset exposures many investors now hold.

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