TheMonsoon Ledger

Weekly Brief No. 6 ·

Glamsterdam reaches Sepolia with a 200 million gas limit, more than three times mainnet's

Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade went live on the Sepolia testnet with a 200 million block gas limit, against 60 million on mainnet, and client teams scheduled the same limit for Hoodi on 26 October. In Singapore, MAS issued a second tokenised MAS Bill in wholesale CBDC and said stablecoins may have limits for large wholesale settlement.

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In the week of 5 October 2026 Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade went live on the Sepolia testnet with a block gas limit of 200 million, against 60 million on mainnet, and client teams scheduled the same limit for the Hoodi testnet on 26 October. Five pilots on the Pilot Scorecard run contracts on Ethereum mainnet. In Singapore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) issued its second tokenised MAS Bill in wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC), and its Managing Director said stablecoins may have limits for settling large wholesale transactions.

Glamsterdam on Sepolia, with a 200 million gas limit

Glamsterdam activated on Sepolia on 6 October at epoch 353,024, 13:53:36 UTC (Ethereum Foundation). Sepolia’s network configuration raises the block gas limit, the cap on the computation and storage a block can include, to 200 million at the same epoch (Lodestar #10172). On 12 October Sepolia blocks carried a limit of about 200 million and used between 53 million and 82 million gas each (Sepolia Etherscan). Mainnet blocks carried 60 million (Etherscan). Validators set the limit their blocks signal: the Foundation notes that the Prysm and Teku clients default to 60 million after activation unless operators configure 200 million.

The Foundation describes Glamsterdam as “advancing Ethereum’s L1 scaling roadmap”. Two of its changes are what make a higher limit workable. Block-level access lists (EIP-7928) record the accounts and storage each block touches, so clients can read state and validate transactions in parallel. Enshrined proposer-builder separation (EIP-7732) splits block proposal from payload delivery and gives validators more time to validate each block. The repricing of state creation and state access (EIP-8037, EIP-8038), covered in Weekly Brief No. 4, charges more for the operations that grow and read Ethereum’s state.

On 8 October the Lodestar consensus client merged the Hoodi schedule: Glamsterdam at epoch 132,352, 17:42:48 UTC on 26 October, with the gas limit rising to 200 million at the fork, “same as Sepolia” (Lodestar #10313). The Hoodi schedule in the Ethereum project management repository, which proposes the same epoch and lists possible mainnet times between 1 and 9 December 2026, is still a draft (ethereum/pm #2263), and the Foundation has not announced Hoodi or mainnet dates.1

In Hong Kong, two pilots on the Pilot Scorecard run on Ethereum mainnet: Anchorpoint’s licensed stablecoin HKDAP and Hang Seng’s gold ETF tokenised class. Bosera’s money market ETF tokenised classes run on HashKey Chain, an Ethereum layer 2. In Singapore, UBS Asset Management’s tokenised fund, DBS’s tokenised structured notes and OCBC’s GOLDX are issued on Ethereum mainnet, GOLDX also on Solana. All use whitelisted tokens, as State of Play records. Each issuer, or its tokenisation agent, has the Hoodi cycle to test its contracts before a mainnet date is set.

Hoodi has a date only in client code so far, mainnet has none, and nobody has agreed the final mainnet gas limit. If what Sepolia shows holds on mainnet, ordinary transactions get cheaper and wait less when the network is busy, and applications can do more on Ethereum itself. Rollups such as HashKey Chain, where Bosera’s classes sit, get a stronger base layer underneath them. For the issuers above, that makes mainnet an easier place to stay.

Regulation

On 9 October MAS Managing Director Chia Der Jiun set out MAS’s view of settlement money at the INSEAD Digital Finance & Agentic AI Summit (speech). He said regulated stablecoins and CBDC “can each serve different needs”, with stablecoins likely to find wider use “on crypto exchanges and in fintech payments” (para 20). On par value, “This is not a given for stablecoins”, and “There may be limits to their suitability for settling large wholesale transactions” (para 22). He said “CBDCs will ultimately be needed to anchor monetary stability” (para 23). The speech came a week before MAS’s consultation on stablecoin amendments to the Payment Services Act closes on 16 October (Regulatory Wire). The consultation would require licensed issuers to hold reserves at least equal to the par value of coins in circulation and to redeem at par. Chia said its recognition of foreign stablecoins matters “if regulated stablecoins are to support wholesale cross-border payments and settlement” (para 26).

Read together, the speech and the consultation set the bar a stablecoin has to clear before MAS would let it do the work of central bank money in wholesale settlement, and they give the reason. A deposit holds par because it converts at par into central bank money (Under the Hood). A stablecoin has no such conversion, so its par value is only as good as its reserves and its disclosure. The consultation writes reserve and redemption requirements into law, and its recognition rules will decide which foreign coins count. Meeting them would let a stablecoin into wholesale settlement without making it equal to CBDC: once a coin becomes systemically important, Chia says the need to anchor its value increases (para 22). Until a coin clears the bar, large tokenised transactions in Singapore settle in wholesale CBDC, and stablecoins stay where Chia expects them, on exchanges and in fintech payments.

The bar is about the money; the speech says nothing about ledgers. A stablecoin on Ethereum would face the same reserve, redemption and disclosure tests as one anywhere else, while MAS’s own settlement asset stays on the SGD Testnet. No MAS document says how it would treat a stablecoin on a public chain in wholesale settlement.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and Bank Negara Malaysia agreed at a meeting in Hong Kong on 2 October, announced on 6 October, to “establish a joint policy-focused workstream to promote compliant cross-border stablecoin use cases” (HKMA release). They also agreed to work on tokenisation and digital money, to improve connectivity between their Real Time Gross Settlement systems, and to explore a link between Hong Kong’s Central Moneymarkets Unit and Malaysia’s RENTAS depository. The release names no deliverables or dates.

Pilots

MAS issued its second tokenised MAS Bill, TD26101Z, on 9 October after an auction on 7 October: S$10 million for 14 days, maturing 23 October (MAS issuance calendar). The first, TD26100F, was S$1 million for seven days, issued on 23 September. Both were sold to institutional investors and settled in wholesale CBDC on the SGD Testnet, whose technology and operator MAS has not named. MAS has published no yield, allotment or media release for either. The Pilot Scorecard entry moved the programme’s scale from single to repeat.

On 7 October OCBC launched tokenised Singapore dollar and US dollar deposits for Ant International, which can move liquidity between its entities in Singapore and Malaysia at any hour (OCBC release). The deposits settle on WhaleRTP, which OCBC describes as Ant’s “blockchain-based wholesale settlement platform”. The release names no ledger, gives no amounts and does not say how the interbank leg settles. The Pilot Scorecard entry records it as a new pilot.

On the site

What to watch

  • 16 October: MAS’s stablecoin consultation closes (Regulatory Wire).
  • 23 October: TD26101Z matures, with redemption in wholesale CBDC (MAS).
  • 26 October: Glamsterdam and the 200 million gas limit on Hoodi (Lodestar #10313), then a mainnet date and mainnet gas limit on All Core Devs calls.
  • Before year-end: CMU OmniClear’s digital asset platform and CBDC settlement on EnsembleTX (Policy Address, paras 35 and 50).

Footnotes

  1. Hoodi is named after a metro station in Bengaluru (Ethereum Magicians), on Namma Metro’s Purple Line. ↩