Ethereum's Glamsterdam Test on Sepolia Set to Trial 200M Gas Limit; Prysm Rushes Fix Ahead of Activation

Ethereum developers pushed an urgent update to the Prysm validator client just hours before the Glamsterdam upgrade was due to be tested on the Sepolia testnet, aiming to ensure validators can produce blocks at the required 200 million gas limit. According to ME News, Prysm version 7.2.1 was released on Monday evening to address a configuration issue in validator clients tied to the block gas limit. The Sepolia settings in earlier Prysm releases did not include the new 200 million gas target, meaning validators on older versions would keep proposing blocks capped around 60 million gas unless they manually changed their configuration. Glamsterdam, Ethereum's next major upgrade, will first be trialed on Sepolia. The test notably lifts Sepolia's block gas limit from roughly 60 million to 200 million. Gas represents the amount of computational work a block can include; a higher limit allows more transactions and more complex onchain activity per block, but it also raises hardware requirements for validator nodes. With Prysm 7.2.1, the 200 million gas limit is now built in for Sepolia. Validators that upgrade are expected to automatically adopt the larger block capacity when Glamsterdam activates. Per the test schedule, Glamsterdam is set to activate on Sepolia at 13:53:36 UTC on October 6. At that point, validators running the latest Prysm release should begin proposing blocks with a 200 million gas limit. If a meaningful share of validators continue producing blocks at the legacy 60 million limit, it would weaken the test's ability to evaluate network performance under higher block capacity. The main goal is to assess whether Ethereum's validator set can consistently handle blocks at more than three times the previous default capacity. Ethereum has been gradually expanding block capacity while using test environments to determine whether additional block space makes operating validator nodes prohibitively expensive or too demanding on hardware. Developers will use the results to inform future decisions on block capacity for Ethereum mainnet. The 200 million gas setting applies only to the Sepolia testnet at this stage; Glamsterdam has not yet been activated on mainnet. (Source: BlockBeats)