According to Christine D. Kim, founder of Protocol Watch, Ethereum developers face the possibility of scaling back the scope of the blockchain’s next major Gramsterdam upgrade in order to meet a mid-year deadline.
In the X and Substack newsletter published on Friday, January 23, 2026, Kim said that during this week’s All Core Developer Consensus (ACDC) conference call, developers were made aware that some of the feature sets planned for the Glamsterdam upgrade may not be compatible with shipping by mid-2026.
This situation is reminiscent of the challenges that plagued previous Pectra upgrades.
“Some of you who have been reading my newsletter since the Pectra upgrade days may be internally groaning and thinking, ‘No more!'” Kim wrote in the post.
Gramsterdam will be the first major test of the new bi-annual upgrade pace introduced by the Ethereum Foundation in 2025.
Gramsterdam will be born after Ethereum successfully implements it. face upgrade It was intended to bring significant improvements to network fairness and processing power.
What happens if Ethereum’s Gramsterdam upgrade expires?
EIP 7732 is known as Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) Devnet-0, and if it misses its deadline, it may be reduced in scope or removed from Gramsterdam.
This feature is highly anticipated as it aims to reduce the risks of manipulation and centralization in Ethereum’s maximum extractable value economy.
At ACDC’s call, developers agreed to aim for interoperable implementations by the end of February, but stressed that this may not happen within the set deadline.
The second major component, EIP-7928 for block-level access lists (BALs), enables parallel processing capabilities and increases network throughput.
However, implementation efforts have been hampered by technical challenges across client teams in the consensus layer.
Ethereum Foundation Protocol Prototyping Team Lead Toni Wahrstatter reported that engine API changes are impacting EIP 7928’s Consensus Layer (CL) client implementation.
According to Kimno team has yet achieved a fully functional implementation of partial cell proofing, the network changes required to support further increases in blob capacity.
A stress test conducted by the Ethereum Foundation’s EthPandaOps team in December revealed a further complication.
Enrico del Fante, a Consensys developer working on the Teku client, reported an issue discovered with the Teku client during stress testing. However, he reportedly said his team is still working on mitigating known issues.
Del Fante asked the EthPandaOps team to pause further mainnet stress testing while it develops mitigations, noting that the issue has delayed work on Gramsterdam.
February deadline is approaching
The developers have yet to officially acknowledge the discrepancy in Gramsterdam’s scope and schedule.
Kim said the developers were aware there might be an issue and agreed to address it by the end of February.
According to Nimbus developer Etan Kissling, the Nimbus and Lodestar teams have completed this preliminary work, but other client teams are still updating their systems.
The delay in Gramsterdam may also affect the Hegota upgrade, which is scheduled to take place after the successful implementation of Gramsterdam.
Alex Stokes, co-leader of the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Coordination Team, encouraged proposal authors to present their ideas at the upcoming ACDC.