Ethereum Client Prysm Ships 200M Gas Limit Fix Hours Before Glamsterdam Test

Offchain Labs, which maintains the Prysm Ethereum consensus client, released version 7.2.1 on Monday, hours before the Glamsterdam upgrade goes live on the Sepolia testnet. With the update, Prysm validators default to a 200 million gas limit once the fork activates, rather than the 60 million the prior release used unless operators set a higher number themselves.

Glamsterdam is scheduled to activate on Sepolia at epoch 353,024, or 13:53:36 UTC on Oct. 6, according to the Ethereum Foundation’s testnet announcement. Sepolia is a test network where developers try out protocol changes before they reach mainnet. Its shared configuration was updated on Sept. 24 to lift the gas limit to 200 million at the fork.

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That schedule, set under EIP-8261, arrived after Prysm had already cut v7.2.0, the version the foundation listed as Sepolia-ready. Validators on v7.2.0 would “default to a 60M gas limit in their Gloas proposer preferences,” its release notes warned, and anyone who wanted 200 million had to configure it manually. The team said a follow-up release would carry the schedule.

Version 7.2.1 is that release. For validators running it, the higher limit “needs no action,” per the notes. Operators who still set a gas limit flag from older setups will override the 200 million schedule, though, and the client now warns them about it at startup.

Gas is how Ethereum measures the computing work a block can hold. A higher limit makes room for more transactions per block but puts more load on the machines running nodes. At 200 million, Sepolia’s limit will be more than three times the old 60 million default.

The release also switches on partial data columns by default, so nodes can trade individual cells of blob data instead of entire columns, and patches a bug in how Prysm builds the first post-fork block in some cases.

Prysm was one of two consensus clients the foundation flagged for the lower default. The foundation said in the same announcement that Teku 26.9.1 “defaults to a 60M gas limit after activation” and that Teku validators who want 200 million must set it with a command-line flag. As of Tuesday morning, 26.9.1 was still Teku’s newest release on GitHub.

Glamsterdam bundles two sets of changes, Gloas on the consensus side and Amsterdam on the execution side. Most notable are enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), which writes the handoff between validators and block builders into the protocol, and block-level access lists, which let nodes process transactions in parallel. Vitalik Buterin has argued that ePBS alone does not stop a small group of builders from gaining outsized power.

“Hoodi and mainnet activation dates have not yet been decided,” the foundation said.

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