The Glamsterdam Era: What Enshrined PBS Actually Means for MEV on Base and frfr.fun

Ethereum's next major hard fork, Glamsterdam, is being called the largest protocol change to the network's core layer since The Merge in 2022, and its headline feature — enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) — will reshape how blocks are built and how MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) flows through the ecosystem.The upgrade bundles ten Ethereum Improvement Proposals under the Glamsterdam Meta EIP-7773, with two headliners doing the structural heavy lifting: EIP-7732, which enshrines Proposer-Builder Separation directly in the protocol, and EIP-7928, which introduces Block-Level Access Lists so validators can process unrelated transactions in parallel.

This piece breaks down what Glamsterdam actually ships, why the "MEV extraction" framing common in earlier commentary overstates what ePBS enables, and — because this is written for the frfr.fun audience — what any of it realistically means for a Base-based, USDC-denominated launchpad. Short version: less than you'd think, and mostly in the opposite direction from "bigger opportunity for searchers."

1. What Glamsterdam Actually Ships

Glamsterdam pairs a consensus-layer component (Gloas) with an execution-layer component (Amsterdam), and centers on two proposals:

EIP-7732 (ePBS): This enshrines proposer-builder separation into the protocol, replacing the trusted off-chain relays used today — such as MEV-Boost — with in-protocol bids, commitments, and payments. A new Payload Timeliness Committee (PTC) — a randomly selected validator subset — attests whether a builder's committed payload was revealed correctly and on time, which is the mechanism that replaces trust in a relay operator.
EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists): transactions pre-declare the state they'll touch, letting validators execute non-conflicting transactions in parallel. The main fee-reduction lever is higher block capacity via BALs, enabling a planned gas limit increase from 60 million toward 200 million.
EIP-7904 (gas repricing): a general repricing of opcodes targeting roughly a 78.6% reduction in L1 fees by realigning costs with actual computational load.
A supporting cluster of quality-of-life and state-cost EIPs rounds out the package.

One structural note the original framing of this topic tends to gloss over: ePBS is also intended to expand the tight block propagation and validation window from roughly 2 seconds to about 9 seconds, which is an L1 consensus-timing change, not something that flows through to Base's own 2-second block cadence automatically (more on that below).

2. Timeline: Slower Than Earlier Estimates Suggested

Glamsterdam was originally penciled in for the first half of 2026. That slipped. After the Soldøgn interop concluded on May 2, 2026, Q3 2026 became the more realistic target, and even that has kept moving: a firmer base case, given the two-to-four months of public-testnet seasoning recent forks have needed, is roughly September through December 2026. Ethereum Foundation contributors have noted Glamsterdam is proving trickier and slower than the prior Fusaka upgrade, so further slippage is possible — getting ePBS right outranks hitting any fixed date. Some sources cite "end of August 2026" as a working estimate; treat that as the optimistic end of the range rather than a locked date. No mainnet block height has been announced, and the clearest leading indicator will be Sepolia and Hoodi testnet activations.

3. ePBS and MEV: Redistribution and Transparency, Not a Bigger Extraction Toolkit

This is the point where the "traders, prepare your bots" framing runs into trouble. ePBS's stated purpose is to remove the trust dependency on off-chain relays and reduce the centralization risk that comes with it — not to hand searchers a more powerful or more profitable attack surface. One estimate puts the potential MEV reduction from ePBS as high as 70%, though that figure isn't universally agreed on: more cautious technical assessments note that ePBS may reshape priority fees, but the direction is uncertain, since actual fees depend on L1 demand. Read across sources, the honest summary is: ePBS makes the builder market's rules explicit and auditable, and removes a specific trust assumption — it does not create a new mathematically "guaranteed" channel for extracting value, and no credible technical source frames it that way.

It's also worth being clear-eyed about how concentrated the builder market already is, since that's the market ePBS is trying to reform. As of mid-2026, the top two builders — Titan and Quasar — construct roughly 73% of all Ethereum blocks, and including the third- and fourth-largest builders pushes that above 95%, well past the threshold regulators typically treat as highly concentrated. That's actually more concentrated than the figure commonly cited from 2023–2024 research, when three builders — beaverbuild, rsync, and Titan — produced approximately 80% of all MEV-Boost blocks. Enshrining PBS in the protocol removes the relay as a trust bottleneck; it doesn't, on its own, undo that concentration, and several researchers frame reducing it as an open problem ePBS only partially addresses.

4. Why This Doesn't Translate Directly to Base — Today

Here's the part that matters most for a Base-native audience: ePBS is an Ethereum L1 consensus change. Base doesn't have the market structure it's reforming.

Base runs a single sequencer operated by Coinbase, so unlike Ethereum there is no public mempool gossip — an RPC endpoint is the only way a transaction reaches the network, and slower endpoints simply mean later inclusion. The classic "monitor the mempool for a large pending buy, then front-run and back-run it" mechanic that MEV sandwich strategies depend on requires a public, gossiped mempool — the thing Base structurally doesn't expose. Base's ordering risk today isn't a competitive searcher auction; it's whatever ordering logic Coinbase's sequencer applies internally, which isn't publicly auditable the way an ePBS auction is.

Base did reach "Stage 1" decentralization status in April 2025, but that milestone is about withdrawal and fraud-proof mechanics, not sequencing. Base still has Coinbase as its sole sequencer operator, and centralized sequencing carries real operational risk independent of MEV — Base experienced a block-production halt on August 5, 2025, its second major outage in two years, reviving concerns about the lack of any failover mechanism.

Shared or "based" sequencing — where L1 validators or a shared network like Espresso handle L2 ordering, which is the scenario under which ePBS-style dynamics would actually reach Base — is real but not yet live. Production rollout of Superchain shared sequencing is expected sometime in 2026 alongside native interop; until then, each Superchain member, including Base, continues running its own centralized sequencer. No firm date has been set. Until that ships, atomic bundles spanning L1 and Base don't have the infrastructure to exist as described in earlier speculative write-ups on this topic.

5. What Sandwich Attacks and Sniping Actually Are — and Why We're Not Publishing a Playbook

It's worth being straightforward with readers about why this section looks different from a typical "strategy breakdown."

A sandwich attack works by placing one order immediately before a victim's pending trade and another immediately after, capturing the price movement the victim's own trade causes. Liquidity sniping is buying an outsized share of a token's supply in the instant liquidity goes live, ahead of the retail buyers a fair-launch platform is nominally designed to serve. Both are real, well-documented practices in MEV research, and both work by extracting value from an identifiable other trader's transaction — not from market inefficiency the way arbitrage does.

We're choosing not to publish a step-by-step operational blueprint for running either of these against frfr.fun's own trading flow. Setting the technical inapplicability aside for a moment (Base's lack of a public mempool already blunts most of it), frfr.fun markets itself as a fair-launch, USDC-denominated platform — publishing a bot-construction guide aimed at extracting value from the retail traders and creators that platform serves runs directly against that positioning, and against the interests of the people this blog exists to inform. Readers who want the general mechanics can find them in the academic MEV literature; we don't think a launchpad's own blog is the right place to operationalize them against its own users.

Cross-DEX arbitrage is a different category — it doesn't require targeting a specific victim's pending order, and it's generally understood as a market-efficiency function rather than an extraction technique. A token trading on frfr.fun's bonding curve at a different price than the same pair on Aerodrome or Uniswap will attract arbitrage flow regardless of what any single trader does about it; that's a normal, non-adversarial feature of having liquidity split across venues, and not something we're withholding.

6. Protecting Yourself as a Trader or Creator

Since Base has no public mempool, the standard Ethereum L1 defense — routing through a private-mempool RPC like Flashbots Protect — doesn't map onto frfr.fun the way it would for L1 DeFi. The core function of tools like Flashbots Protect is withholding a pending transaction's visibility from the public mempool and handing inclusion to a private builder-relay path instead — but that protection only matters when the underlying threat is a public mempool in the first place. On Base, that threat model largely doesn't exist yet; the practical risks are different:

Slippage tolerance: keeping maximum slippage low on any swap reduces how much room exists for a trade to be executed at a worse-than-expected price, which remains relevant on Base even without a public mempool, since thin early liquidity on a freshly launched token can move price sharply on its own.
Timing around launch: the first block or two after liquidity goes live is where price impact is largest per dollar traded; that's a function of thin liquidity, not searcher activity specific to Base.
Use frfr.fun's own front end and standard RPC paths rather than third-party routing tools of unknown provenance when trading newly launched tokens — this is basic operational hygiene, not a claim about frfr.fun's specific infrastructure, which we haven't independently audited.

If you're a builder rather than a trader, note that frfr.fun's specific fee structure (commonly cited as a 6% creator / 14% referrer split) is the platform's own self-description and hasn't been independently verified against on-chain data in the course of this research — treat it as a platform claim, not a third-party-audited figure.

7. Regulatory Context

As of July 24, 2026, the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act has passed the House (294–134, July 17, 2025) and the Senate Banking Committee (15–9, May 14, 2026), but has not received a full Senate floor vote. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said the bill likely won't get floor time before the chamber's summer recess, though the White House's crypto adviser has pushed back, still holding out hope for early August. The practical window for 2026 passage closes around the Senate's August 10 recess; a fall vote is possible but faces competition from appropriations fights and the midterm election calendar. The GENIUS Act, which governs payment stablecoins specifically (distinct from CLARITY's broader market-structure scope), has been in force since July 2025. None of this changes today, but any MEV- or trading-infrastructure content tied to a USDC-denominated launchpad sits inside a regulatory environment that is still actively being written — worth flagging for readers making decisions based on the assumption that the current rules are settled.

Corrections and Transparency Log

Retitled and reframed the piece. The original was structured as an operational MEV-extraction playbook (sandwich attack bundle construction, liquidity-sniping "snipe protocol," bot infrastructure specs) targeting frfr.fun launches specifically. We rewrote it as an explainer of what Glamsterdam/ePBS actually changes, with a risk-and-protection section for frfr.fun's own traders and creators instead of an attack guide. This is an editorial judgment call, not a factual correction — flagging it explicitly since it's a bigger change than our usual pass.
Corrected the core technical premise. The original implied ePBS creates new, more powerful MEV extraction opportunities for searchers. Research indicates the opposite emphasis: ePBS's purpose is removing relay trust dependencies and improving auction transparency; its net effect on MEV volume is debated, with estimates ranging from a large reduction to "uncertain, depends on L1 demand."
Corrected the timeline. The original stated Glamsterdam launches "August 2026" as settled fact. Current reporting (as of late June 2026) treats September–December 2026 as the firmer base case, with further slippage possible; no mainnet block height is set.
Corrected the Base mempool premise. The original's sandwich-attack and sniping strategies assume a public, gossiped mempool on Base. Base runs a single Coinbase-operated sequencer with no public mempool — transactions reach the network only via RPC, which structurally blocks the classic mempool-surveillance mechanic as described.
Corrected/updated builder concentration figures. The original cited "three builders, 75–80%" without sourcing. Current (mid-2026) data shows the top two builders alone at roughly 73%, and the top four above 95% — more concentrated, not less, than the older figure.
Removed unverifiable/speculative infrastructure claims. Statements about atomic L1/Base bundles, "top-tier ePBS builder" access for L2 searchers, and specific gas-optimization tactics for attack contracts were removed as either not yet technically possible (shared sequencing isn't live) or as operational detail we're declining to publish per item 1.
Flagged frfr.fun's fee structure (6% creator / 14% referrer split) as an unverified platform self-description, consistent with every prior piece in this series.
Added regulatory context (CLARITY Act status as of July 24, 2026; GENIUS Act) per standing editorial convention.
Removed all metadata from the original draft; reformatted to clean Markdown.