Ethereum & Altcoins: ETH outpaces bitcoin as Glamsterdam eyes October 6

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• Ether posted a stronger 24-hour gain than bitcoin, narrowing the recent slide in the ETH/BTC ratio.
• Core developers have tentatively set October 6 to activate the Glamsterdam upgrade on the public Sepolia testnet.
• The date depends on a clean run of devnet-10, the final internal testing round before any public activation is locked in.

Ether pulled away from bitcoin this week, posting a stronger 24-hour gain even as BTC slipped back under $77,000. The divergence narrowed the ETH/BTC ratio’s recent slide and reflects a pattern that has shown up periodically through 2026: when broad crypto sentiment turns cautious around a macro catalyst, ether has at times held up better than bitcoin rather than falling in lockstep with it. That is a reversal of the more typical relationship, where ETH tends to amplify bitcoin’s moves in both directions rather than counter them. CoinGecko shows the gap opening through the session.

Ether’s relative strength this week comes against a backdrop of renewed attention on Ethereum’s protocol roadmap. Core developers have tentatively set October 6 as the target date to activate Glamsterdam, the network’s next major upgrade, on the Sepolia public testnet. That would be the first time the upgrade’s full bundle of changes runs on a network anyone can access, rather than in the closed developer-only testing environments used earlier in the process.

The date carries a real caveat. Developers have tied it explicitly to a clean run of devnet-10, the last internal testing round before any public-facing activation gets locked in. If devnet-10 surfaces problems that need fixing, the Sepolia date moves; Ethereum’s release process has pushed testnet dates before when testing turned up issues late. That is a normal part of how the network ships major upgrades, not a sign of trouble specific to Glamsterdam, but it does mean October 6 is a target rather than a commitment. The Ethereum Foundation’s own engineering blog has been publishing incremental updates on the upgrade’s testing progress, including a recent post detailing repricing changes and how they are being tested ahead of any public rollout.

Glamsterdam itself bundles a set of changes aimed at both scaling the network further and adjusting how certain operations are priced for validators and users. Upgrades of this size typically move through several testnets, Sepolia among the more heavily used, before graduating to a mainnet activation date, so a Sepolia debut is a meaningful step in the pipeline but still one stage removed from anything that touches mainnet directly.

For holders and developers watching the timeline, the practical takeaway is less about the specific date and more about what it signals: Ethereum’s core development process continues to hit its internal testing milestones on a broadly predictable cadence, even as the network carries a heavier and more complex set of changes than earlier hard forks did. That predictability has itself become something the market watches, given how much of Ethereum’s competitive position rests on shipping scaling improvements on a schedule other layer-1 and layer-2 ecosystems can plan around. Between the price divergence and the testnet timeline, this week offers a rare case where Ethereum’s market behavior and its development calendar tell a similar story: a network holding its own against bitcoin while continuing to execute on a multi-year upgrade path.