The Ethereum Foundation has opened Platåberget, an early public test network for the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, and said the release gives the ecosystem a first chance to test a set of changes that will reshape both block construction and gas accounting on Ethereum.
The foundation said the upgrade introduces breaking changes for application developers. It singled out wallets, indexers, and gas estimators that rely on hard-coded maximum gas limits, saying those tools will fail and need updates.
Glamsterdam changes both consensus and execution
In its outline of the fork, the Ethereum Foundation said Glamsterdam includes several major changes across the consensus and execution layers.
- In-protocol proposer-builder separation: the upgrade changes how blocks are built, proposed, and verified. It includes a new builder API flow and PTC, or payload timeliness, checks. Infrastructure tied to block production and validation pipelines should expect impact.
- Block-level access lists: Glamsterdam adds mandatory block-level access lists that record accessed state locations and post-transaction changes. These lists are stored separately from the block body and can be exchanged between execution-layer nodes through eth/71.
- Gas repricing: the fork introduces a coordinated set of gas cost changes aimed at pushing the gas floor to about 200 million. The foundation said any tool with a hard-coded maximum gas limit will be affected.
- Larger contracts and initcode: the maximum deployable contract size will rise from 24 KiB to 64 KiB, while maximum initcode size will increase from 48 KiB to 128 KiB.
The full list of included Ethereum Improvement Proposals is being tracked in Glamsterdam meta EIP-7773, according to the foundation.
Public participation is open ahead of the Aug. 20 testnet fork
Platåberget is described as a short-lived but relatively stable testnet intended to run for several months. The idea is to let the community test Glamsterdam before the upgrade reaches longer-running testnets such as Sepolia and Hoodi.
The validator set on Platåberget is relatively small, but open to the public. Anyone can deposit new validators and test validator and builder deposit flows. The foundation said ePBS represents a major consensus-layer change, and it wants solo stakers, distributed validator technology projects, custom software teams, and large-scale operators to have enough time to test their infrastructure.
The Glamsterdam fork on Platåberget is scheduled for Aug. 20, leaving time for deposits and fork-transition preparation.
The Platåberget page also includes a one-click network setup flow for execution-layer and consensus-layer clients, along with a faucet that provides testnet ETH for deposits and gas fees.
Node operators need to check client support and deposit paths
The foundation listed several practical points for users planning to run nodes on the network.
- The public will be able to submit validator or builder deposits through the Dora explorer.
- The genesis validator set will not pre-allocate auto-staking to a small number of entities. Instead, it will be bootstrapped through public deposits, with some ETH assigned at genesis to help start the network.
- Client releases are optional on a per-team basis, so users need to verify whether their chosen client already includes the required version.
Until client teams prepare tagged releases, the foundation said users should rely on the ethPandaOps container images listed in the announcement for both the consensus and execution layers.
Gas repricing changes more than the block gas limit
The foundation said gas repricing is one of the most consequential parts of Glamsterdam because it touches every wallet, indexer, and gas estimator on the network. It urged developers to use the early test window to identify tools and assumptions that may break before the fork moves toward mainnet.
The repricing effort goes beyond the block gas limit. The cost of individual operations will also change, and EIP-8037 introduces a separate state gas dimension for operations that create new state. Creating accounts, deploying code, or writing a new storage slot will now be metered by a fixed cost per state byte, or CPSB, charged at runtime rather than upfront.
One direct result is that a normal ETH transfer will not always remain a fixed 21,000 gas operation. A transfer to an existing account still costs 21,000 gas, now broken down into TXBASECOST, COLDACCOUNTACCESS, and TXVALUECOST. Sending funds to an account that does not yet exist will add a runtime state gas charge equal to STATEBYTESPERNEWACCOUNT multiplied by CPSB.
That means any tool that assumes 21,000 gas covers all transfers, or that gas estimation works with only a single gas dimension, needs to be revisited. The foundation pointed developers to EIP-2780 for the decomposed intrinsic cost model and EIP-8038 for higher state access costs.
More testing stages will follow before mainnet
Once feedback is incorporated into client software and specifications, the foundation said it plans to launch a non-final developer network within a month to test extreme consensus scenarios.
After those development networks have run stably for a period of time, the long-lived testnets Sepolia and Hoodi will go through the Glamsterdam fork. If those upgrades complete and remain stable, Ethereum will then move toward a Glamsterdam transition on mainnet.
Where feedback should go
If users find errors or issues in the specifications, the foundation said the best feedback channel is the Ethereum R&D Discord server. For those who do not want to use Discord, issues can also be filed in the relevant specification repositories: consensus, execution, execution-apis, builder-specs, and beacon-APIs.
For people tracking the rollout more closely, the foundation named the Ethereum R&D Discord server, All Core Dev calls, the Glamsterdam upgrade tracker, and EthPandaOps' Glamsterdam devnet GitHub repository as the main channels.
The foundation said Platåberget gives the community an early chance to experience post-Glamsterdam Ethereum and start finding problems, with dApp teams, wallet developers, and infrastructure operators expected to be among the groups most exposed to downstream breakage.