Why Ethereum’s Feb 4 Upgrade Timeline Is Raising Developer Concerns

Ethereum developers highlighted fresh technical challenges during the 68th All Core Developers Testing call held on Tuesday, February 3, as teams continued work on upcoming protocol upgrades.

The meeting focused on progress across the Fusaka and Glamsterdam upgrades, both of which play a key role in Ethereum’s plan to improve data handling and long-term scalability.

The update was shared by Protocol Watch founder Christine D. Kim, who closely tracks Ethereum governance and development discussions. With multiple upgrades moving forward in parallel, developers acknowledged growing coordination pressure as key deadlines approach this week.

Fusaka Testing Exposes Client Performance Gaps

The work on the Fusaka upgrade continues to concentrate on enabling more blob counts to occur, which is an important aspect of Ethereum’s data availability solution.

The teams of the consensus layer clients are working on partial cell proofs, which are useful for enabling more data to be processed efficiently on the network. This is currently being done in a testing environment called blob-devnet-0.

During the call, Barnabas Busa from the Ethereum Foundation’s Developer Operations pointed out that some clients had issues when the blob loads were high.

The Prysm and Lighthouse consensus clients, which are popular consensus clients, were not responding properly to a configuration field related to data column sidecar requests. When the number of blobs increased, the nodes were under stress.

Busa asked all client teams to continue improving their implementations, and he especially asked the Prysm and Sigma Prime teams to investigate this issue further.

He also said that a representative from the Ethereum Foundation team will give a presentation of a new benchmarking tool for execution layer clients at the next ACDT call.

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Ethereum Glamsterdam Timeline Holds Despite Fusaka Issues

However, despite the issues witnessed in the Fusaka testing, the developers have confirmed that Glamsterdam is still on schedule. The bals-devnet-2 network is still on course to be launched on Wednesday, February 4.

Ethereum Foundation engineer Stefan Starflinger stated that the clients for Lighthouse and Lodestar are ready to be tested on the new devnet, although some implementation details are still being verified. To ensure that the launch process is as smooth as possible, all teams were asked to include two execution API updates related to EIP-7928.

These changes introduce block-level access list methods and are required to support the new devnet. The developers also agreed that the later epbs-devnet-0, which is currently tentatively scheduled for late February, would include all updates from the latest consensus spec release, version 1.7.0-alpha.2.

February 4 Deadline Set for Hegota Feature Proposals

Aside from the updates on testing, it was also pointed out that February 4 is the last deadline for the submission of proposals for headliner features in the Hegota update. Barnabas Busa emphasized that if teams want their features to be considered, they have to complete their proposals this week.

Christine Kim pointed out that the developers are being more careful this time around. In previous cycles, having too many upgrades to work on at the same time resulted in large changes in scope and delays.

Since Glamsterdam is expected to ship before Hegota, teams are being more careful not to make changes that could affect the timelines.

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