This is a maintenance release with a number of performance improvements to block processing and initial sync, and is recommended for all users.

A few things worth highlighting:

• The Amsterdam hardfork is scheduled on the Sepolia testnet at timestamp 1791294816 (Oct 6, 2026, 13:53:36 UTC). Sepolia node operators must upgrade before that time.
• The Holesky testnet has been removed, as the network reached end-of-life.
• Go 1.24 is no longer supported. Release binaries and Docker images are now built with Go 1.27.

Fork Implementation

• Schedule the Amsterdam fork on Sepolia (#35734)
• Remove the EIP-7610 implementation (#35581)
• Update EIP-2780 and EIP-8038 gas parameters (#35454, #35497)
• Update EIP-7997 deterministic factory contract (#35458)
• Update EIP-8037, repaying the outstanding gas debt first after absorbing a child frame (#35633)
• Implement parallel block execution driven by the block-level access list (#35264, #35441, #35443, #35459, #35461, #35465, #35575, #35693)
• Rename "regular gas" to "execution gas" to match EIP-8037 (#35457, #35486)

Core

• Remove the Holesky testnet (#35591)
• Optimize JSON decoding of large requests such as engine_newPayload (#35518)
• Process the receipts for bloom construction and root calculation alongside execution (#35738)
• Introduce a precompile result cache shared between prefetcher, block processing and miner (#35388, #35473, #35526, #35578, #35753)
• Parallelize chain data and state writes in the post-execution commit (#35595)
• Do not seal a block if a database error occurred (#35427)
• Fix a panic in the log indexer when a reorg shortens the chain onto the rendered block (#35619)
• Honor ExecuteConfig.EnableTracer for the EVM-level tracing hooks (#35512)
• Add a metered LRU cache variant (#33719)
• Retain block-level access lists alongside bad blocks (#35423)
• Unset the block-level access list at the end of each transaction (#35498)
• Fix the blob cache initialization (#35509)
• Fix head truncation below a diverged tail group (#35551)
• Improve the blob fetcher with a few defensive operations (#35572)
• Fix deadlock when re-requesting partial receipts in eth/70 (#35537)
• Reject empty partial receipt responses in eth/70 (#35593)
• Cap the total size of blocked blob transactions in the sparse blobpool (#35367)
• Fix the Cells/GetCells RLP encoding in eth/72 (#35428)
• Cache recovered blobs in the blobpool to speed up serving pre-eth/72 peers (#35543)
• Add fork validation for transaction types in the state transition (#35588)
• Avoid announcing sparse blob txs to legacy peers (#35589)
• Add eth/71 (EIP-8159) tests (#35389)
• Fix gas tracer hooks and gas measurement (#35646)
• The eth/72 blob buffer is capped at 128 MiB total and 16 MiB per peer (#35766)

Sync

• Optimize the state sync by parallelizing response processing (#35533)
• Implement best-effort downloading of block-level access lists (#35386, #35493)
• Rework the scheduling of body and receipt retrievals during sync (#35680)
• Add metrics for chain segment downloading and snap sync progress (#35678, #35689)
• Various snap v2 fixes and improvements (#35299, #35316, #35463, #35477, #35705, #35722)

Networking

• Validate the announced blob transaction size against the announcer's protocol version (#35524)
• Add more discv5 hive coverage to devp2p (#34770)
• Add eth/72 tests and Amsterdam testdata to devp2p (#35368, #35637, #35647, #35648, #35687)
• Add devp2p discovery listen to serve discv4 and discv5 on a single UDP socket (#35254)

Cryptography

• Reconstruct blobs directly from data cells without KZG recovery (#35528)
• Recover the full cell set of a blob with a fast path for complete data cells (#35529)
• Fix G2.Neg in the bn256 library by syncing with upstream (#35686)

Engine API

• Add support for optional TargetGasLimit and enforce the system contract code check (#35514)
• Allow reorging headBlock down to finalized (#35519)
• Fix the fork gate on engine_forkchoiceUpdatedWithWitnessV3/V4 (#35719)
• Pass targetGasLimit through in testing_buildBlockV1 (#35501)
• Fix hive failures (#35580, #35664)
• Fix engine_getBlobsV4 returning null cells for blob-mode cache entries (#35439)

RPC

• Reject null for required arguments (#35576)
• Unescape JSON object keys when parsing a message (#35587)
• Reject eth_getLogs ranges with toBlock before fromBlock (#35070)
• Skip unconfigured forks when computing the next fork in eth_config (#35553)
• Return null for pending and unresolvable tags in eth_getHeaderByNumber (#35627)
• Treat a post-merge difficulty override as no-op in eth_simulateV1 (#35672)
• Reject blob and setcode call arguments without to (#35695)
• Remove per-authorization gas guard in the eth_createAccessList (#35698)
• Return the actual used gas for plain transfer estimates after Amsterdam (#35592)
• Make the block parameter of debug_traceCall optional (#35583)
• Add slotNumber to the GraphQL block schema (#35469)
• Return NotFound when the block transaction count is nil in ethclient (#35605)
• Verify the withdrawal list against the header root in ethclient (#35610)

Geth & Tooling

• Deprecate the state sizer tool (#35520)
• Use original Solidity names for custom errors in abigen v2 bindings (#35332)
• Filter out unexpected logs from the event subscription stream instead of terminating it (#35701)
• Respect the configured log limit in the struct logger OnEnter/OnExit hooks (#35360)
• Add a t8n test for a missing London base fee config (#35636)

Build

• Drop support for Go 1.24 and add support for Go 1.27 (#35573)
• Upgrade the -dlgo bootstrap Go version to 1.27.1 (#35656)
• Build RPM packages for Fedora COPR (#35557)
• Add a retry mechanism for package uploading (#35510)

For a full rundown of the changes please consult the Geth 1.17.6 release milestone.

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As with all our previous releases, you can find the:

• Pre-built binaries for all platforms on our downloads page
• Docker images published under ethereum/client-go (use "stable" tag)
• Ubuntu packages in our Launchpad PPA repository
• macOS packages in our Homebrew Tap repository