Ethereum’s 200M Gas Test Goes Live: Glamsterdam Pushes Sepolia to a New Scaling Extreme

Ethereum is planning a large Layer 1 capacity experiment in which the gas limit on the Sepolia testnet will be increased to 200 million blocks as part of the Glamsterdam upgrade. This capacity experiment more than triples the existing Sepolia gas limit of 60 million blocks to learn more about validator and client behavior with greater computational capacity per block.

Prysm version 7.2.1 included a Sepolia hard fork-defined gas limit schedule before the hard fork at epoch 353,024 on October 6 at 13:53:36 UTC. Prysm 7.2.1 validators will use the 200 million gas limit setting by default after the Gloas hard fork. 

Validators running Prysm 7.2.0 can participate in the hard fork, but the version was released before the schedule update, so it defaults to 60 million gas unless validators set a higher gas limit.

Ethereum Tests a Major Expansion in Block Capacity

A block gas limit restricts the amount of computation that can be done in a block by transactions. Raising the block gas limit increases the number of token swaps, payments, and other smart contract transactions that can occur in a block. Higher gas limits do not necessarily lead to lower transaction fees. 

Other factors affecting transaction fees include user demand and the types of transactions users want to make. Sepolia’s updated gas limit is higher than the 60 million mainnet gas limit adopted in the past on Ethereum. 

The Sepolia testnet can provide insights into validator and other client behavior to help inform decisions about whether to implement similar changes on mainnet.

The experiment is part of Glamsterdam, a joint Amsterdam and Gloas upgrade to the execution and consensus layers, respectively. Key features of the upgrade include a built-in proposer-builder split and Block-Level Access Lists to improve Layer 1 capacity.

Glamsterdam Devnet 11 conducted a test to transition the chain from 60 million to 200 million. A test on Sepolia will allow public testing with multiple clients and validator configurations to catch issues that might not occur in private testing.

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Increased Ethereum state capacity has downsides. The Glamsterdam initiative proposes gas fee modifications to address these downsides by increasing the computational burden of certain transactions on full nodes. EIP-8037 increases the cost of creating a new state. EIP-8038 makes other changes to account and storage access costs.

Sepolia Test Does Not Mean a 200M Mainnet Gas Limit

The Oct. 6 activation applies to Sepolia, not Ethereum mainnet. Ethereum Foundation’s deployment schedule lists Hoodi and mainnet activation dates as undecided.  

Sepolia validators need to use compatible consensus and execution clients to continue participating in the upgraded network. Several consensus clients, including Prysm, Lighthouse, Nimbus, Teku, Lodestar, and Grandine, are compatible with the Sepolia network.

The test provides developers with information about the stability of large contract sizes. The test also helps developers understand how increased transaction throughput and state size growth interact with changes to Glamsterdam’s gas pricing in preparation for mainnet deployment.

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In Prysm version 7.2.1, the default block gas limit on Sepolia will be 200 million after the Gloas hard fork upgrade. Operators can configure a different block gas limit using proposer settings or other Prysm APIs, including an API recommended by Prysm. Mainnet has not yet been upgraded. Upgrades to mainnet are planned separately. This test is still experimental.

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