Glamsterdam gets a testnet date, and Asia's issuers on Ethereum have contracts to check

In the week of 21 September 2026 Ethereum’s core developers confirmed that the Glamsterdam upgrade will activate on the Sepolia testnet on 6 October, the first fixed date on its path to mainnet. The upgrade reprices contract storage, which puts a testing task on every institution in the covered markets with a live contract on Ethereum mainnet. In Hong Kong, ChinaAMC moved its digital money market fund’s underlying deposits onto HSBC’s tokenised deposit service, and the HKMA’s chief executive described CMU OmniClear’s planned platform for on-chain bond settlement.

Glamsterdam’s gas repricing and the issuers on Ethereum mainnet

At the All Core Devs testing call on 21 September (ACDT #97), developers confirmed Sepolia activation for 6 October at epoch 353024, 13:53:36 UTC, with client releases due on 29 September. Hoodi, the next testnet, is tentatively set for 27 October, with a go or no-go decision on 8 October. No mainnet date is set. The date had moved: the agenda for the 3 September call had proposed Sepolia on 28 September (ACDC #186). The upgrade’s contents are listed in its meta EIP.

For institutions, the changes that matter are the gas repricings. EIP-8037 raises the cost of creating state: new accounts, new storage slots and deployed code. EIP-8038 raises the cost of reading and writing existing state. The Ethereum Foundation’s guidance for contract developers says contracts with hardcoded gas assumptions may break: fixed stipends such as Solidity’s 2,300-gas transfer and send, hardcoded gas values in calls, and logic that branches on remaining gas. It asks maintainers to check their code and wallet and infrastructure providers to update gas estimation, and says ordinary users need do nothing.

Three pilots on this site run on Ethereum mainnet:

HKDAP, Anchorpoint’s licensed Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, an ERC-20 behind an upgradeable proxy with a wallet whitelist and freeze functions.
UBS Asset Management’s tokenised fund in a Singapore Variable Capital Company, under Project Guardian.
DBS’s tokenised structured notes, distributed to accredited and institutional investors.

A fourth, ChinaAMC’s digital money market fund, sits on a chain ChinaAMC calls “public permissioned”; third-party trackers list it on Ethereum, which ChinaAMC has not confirmed.

Permissioned tokens do more work per transfer than a plain ERC-20. Before moving tokens, the contract checks that both wallets are on the whitelist and that neither is frozen, and each check reads contract state. Under EIP-8038 those reads cost more. Whether the increase is material for any of these contracts is not public; it depends on how each contract stores its lists. What is clear is that each issuer, or its tokenisation agent, has a Sepolia and Hoodi test cycle to run before mainnet, and that an upgradeable proxy like HKDAP’s lets an issuer fix a contract without reissuing the token.

Glamsterdam also adds EIP-7708, under which plain ETH transfers emit a log, the same kind of record token transfers already produce. Monitoring tools that read token transfer logs can then see ETH movements the same way.

I think Glamsterdam strengthens the case for Ethereum mainnet. The repricing makes some operations dearer, including the whitelist and freeze checks permissioned tokens run on every transfer, but per-transfer fees are small beside an issuer’s operating costs. Capacity matters more. Block-level access lists (EIP-7928) and a proposed 200 million gas limit, on the agenda for the 24 September execution-layer call, are meant to raise throughput, which weakens the argument for moving low-volume institutional instruments to a layer-2 network. The mainnet gas limit is not yet decided, and throughput has not been what held these pilots back, so this is a judgement about direction. Gas measurements for a whitelisted token contract on Sepolia after 6 October, and any issuer statement about Glamsterdam, will test it.

Regulation

On 23 September HKMA chief executive Eddie Yue told the Treasury Markets Summit that CMU OmniClear is building a digital asset platform for “24-hour, on-chain atomic settlement”. He said it will support settlement against CBDCs and explore integration with tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins. He also said half the world’s digital bonds by volume were issued in Hong Kong in the first half of 2026, and repeated the plan to test tokenised Exchange Fund Bills. The speech fills in the CMU OmniClear commitment in the Policy Address (para 35): a settlement platform run by the HKMA’s central securities depository, on a ledger the HKMA has not named, that could accept stablecoins as well as central bank and commercial bank money.

Pilots

On 21 September ChinaAMC (HK) said that the HKD and USD deposits underlying its digital money market fund are now tokenised using HSBC’s tokenised deposit capability, with Standard Chartered providing custody and digital asset infrastructure. ChinaAMC says the deposits can move in real time and outside operating hours while remaining conventional bank deposits “in all legal and prudential respects”, and calls it the first such arrangement in Asia-Pacific. The fund’s units and its cash are now both tokenised, but on different ledgers: HSBC’s network for the deposits, and the fund’s own chain for the units. Investor subscriptions are still paid in fiat.

On the site

Pilot Scorecard: ChinaAMC Digital Money Market Fund records the tokenised deposit integration as an expansion.

What to watch

Glamsterdam client releases on 29 September, Sepolia on 6 October, and the Hoodi go or no-go on 8 October.
MAS’s stablecoin consultation closes on 16 October 2026 (Wire).
CMU OmniClear’s platform, due this year, and CBDC settlement on EnsembleTX around year-end (Policy Address, paras 35 and 50).