go-ethereum v1.17.6

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.

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

Source ethereum/go-ethereum · v1.17.6 · 2026-09-23 · upstream release

Mirrored verbatim for indexing. All rights belong to the upstream project.

Release notes are published by the upstream project and mirrored here for indexing. All rights belong to their authors.