Geth 1.17.6 schedules Amsterdam on Sepolia for 6 October
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readGo Ethereum 1.17.6, released on 23 September, is labelled a maintenance release, but it carries a deadline. It schedules the Amsterdam hard fork on the Sepolia testnet at timestamp 1791294816, which is 6 October 2026 at 13:53:36 UTC, and the release notes say Sepolia node operators must upgrade before then. The Holesky testnet, which reached end of life, has been removed from the client, and Go 1.24 is no longer supported: binaries and Docker images are now built with Go 1.27.
On the Amsterdam side, the release implements parallel block execution driven by the block-level access list - the list, introduced with the fork, of which accounts and storage slots a block touches. It removes the implementation of EIP-7610, updates the gas parameters of EIP-2780 and EIP-8038, updates the deterministic factory contract of EIP-7997, and renames "regular gas" to "execution gas" to match EIP-8037.
Much of the rest is about speed. Receipts for bloom construction and root calculation are processed alongside execution; a precompile result cache is shared between the prefetcher, block processing and the miner; post-execution writes of chain data and state are parallelised; and state sync processes responses in parallel. There are also a number of blob-related changes for the eth/72 protocol, including a cap on the eth/72 blob buffer of 128 MiB in total and 16 MiB per peer, and blob reconstruction directly from data cells without KZG recovery.
What it means
For anyone running Sepolia infrastructure, the date is the item to act on: a node that has not upgraded by 6 October will stop following the testnet when the fork activates. Sepolia is where applications and tooling get their last rehearsal before mainnet, so this is also the first time Amsterdam's new rules run on a network that application developers use every day.
The parallel execution work is the part with a longer tail. A block that declares in advance what it will touch lets a client schedule transactions that do not conflict at the same time. Geth shipping that code path now, on a testnet, is how the performance claims behind the fork start to get measured outside development networks.