Fresh off the success of last month's Fusaka upgrade that reduced the cost of nodes, Ethereum developers are already hard at work planning the next big change to the blockchain.
Enter “gramsterdam”.
The name is a portmanteau of two simultaneous upgrades taking place in Ethereum's two core layers. The execution layer, where transaction rules and smart contracts reside, will undergo an Amsterdam upgrade, and the consensus layer, which coordinates validators and completes blocks, will undergo an upgrade known as Gloas.
At the heart of Gramsterdam is enshrined the Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), officially tracked as EIP-7732. The proposal would build rules into Ethereum's core protocol that separate nodes that construct blocks from nodes that propose blocks, preventing a single entity from controlling which transactions are included and how they are ordered.
Currently, this separation relies heavily on off-chain services known as relays, which introduces trust assumptions and centralization risks. In ePBS, block builders assemble blocks and encrypt and seal their contents, while proposers simply select the most expensive block without seeing or tampering with the contents. Transactions are only made public after the block is completed, reducing opportunities for manipulation and abuse related to MEV or the maximum extractable value. Verifiers and builders can gain additional benefits by reordering, inserting, or censoring transactions.
Another proposal coming to Gramsterdam is Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928). This is an internal change that allows blocks to pre-declare which account and smart contract data they want to access. Rather than discovering this information on a transaction-by-transaction basis, Ethereum software, known as the client, can preload and reuse data more efficiently, making block execution faster, more predictable, and easier to optimize. This change could help level gas costs and lay an important foundation for future scale improvements.
ePBS and block-level access lists are both examples of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). The EIP is a formal proposal that outlines changes to the protocol and serves as the primary coordination mechanism for Ethereum's development process.
The full scope of Gramsterdam has not yet been finalized and additional EIPs will be selected in the coming weeks. As for when, the developers haven't specified a specific date, but say the upgrade will likely happen sometime in 2026.
Read more: Ethereum enables Fusaka upgrade to reduce node costs and speed up Layer 2 payments
