Ethereum Glamsterdam testnet releases Prysm update, Sepolia block gas limit will increase to 200 million

According to CoinDesk, Ethereum developers released version 7.2.1 of the Prysm client on Monday evening, embedding a 200 million Gas limit to complete deployment ahead of the Sepolia testnet testing for the Glamsterdam upgrade on Tuesday.

Glamsterdam is the next major upgrade for Ethereum, which will first be activated on the Sepolia testnet, where developers rehearse changes using tokens with no actual value. Part of Tuesday's testing involves raising the Gas limit on Sepolia from approximately 60 million to 200 million.

Gas is the unit that measures how much computational workload a single block can accommodate on Ethereum. A higher limit means the network can handle more transactions and more complex activities simultaneously, but it also places higher demands on the computers running Ethereum. Prysm is the client software used by Ethereum validators, and its previous version had completed before this setting was added to the Sepolia configuration. Therefore, validators running the old version will still produce blocks with a 60 million Gas limit unless they manually modify the parameters, which undermines the effectiveness of this capacity test.

Validators running the latest version will automatically start proposing blocks with a 200 million Gas limit when Glamsterdam activates on Sepolia at 13:53:36 UTC on October 6. Ethereum has been gradually increasing block capacity to test how far it can go before running validators becomes too demanding or expensive. The 200 million setting is only applicable to Sepolia, and Glamsterdam has not yet been activated on the Ethereum mainnet.