Ethereum opened the Platåberget testnet on August 17 Ethereum Blog as a public, multi-month arena for testing the Glamsterdam upgrade before it reaches long-lived testnets and mainnet. Unlike the short-lived devnets that preceded it, Platåberget is built to run for a few months so developers can break things on purpose and fix them in calm conditions rather than during a live fork.
The pitch to the community is blunt: anything that assumes a hardcapped maximum gas limit will stop working. The Glamsterdam gas repricings target a roughly 200M gas floor and change individual operation costs, so wallets, indexers, and gas estimators that hardcode limits need updates now Ethereum Blog. The repricing also rewrites a fact developers have trusted for years: a transfer to an account that already exists still costs 21,000 gas, but a send to a brand-new account now also incurs state gas charged at runtime.
Why wallets and indexers need to act now
The dangerous part is not the headline gas floor but the new state dimension. Glamsterdam separates execution gas from the cost of creating new state, so any code that assumes 21,000 covers every transfer, or that gas is a single flat dimension, will underprice transactions and can fail Ethereum Blog. Indexers and gas estimators are just as exposed: a tool that predicts fees from a fixed ceiling will return wrong numbers once the state byte cost kicks in.
What Glamsterdam changes on the testnet
Beyond gas, Glamsterdam rewrites how blocks are built. Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) splits block construction from validation and adds a new builder API flow plus Payload-Timeliness Committee checks, specified in EIP-7732 EIP-7732. Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) record every account and storage slot a block touches and let clients validate and compute state roots in parallel, defined in EIP-7928 EIP-7928. The fork also enlarges contracts: the maximum deployed contract size grows from 24KiB to 64KiB and the maximum initcode from 48KiB to 128KiB Ethereum Blog.
How to join and what comes next
The Glamsterdam fork on Platåberget is scheduled for August 20 Ethereum Blog, giving the public time to deposit validators and spin up client images. A one-click Add Network flow and a faucet that dispenses testnet ETH lower the barrier, and anyone can submit validator or builder deposits through the Dora explorer. Client teams treat releases as optional, so operators should confirm their client ships a Glamsterdam build.
After feedback lands, a devnet that stresses pathological consensus scenarios follows within the month, then the long-lived testnets Sepolia and Hoodi run the fork, and only then does Ethereum mainnet transition. For self-custody users, the practical takeaway is indirect but real: the wallet or indexer you rely on must ship fixes before mainnet, or routine sends could fail or misprice. Ethereum.org’s self-custody wallet security guidance Ethereum self-custody wallet security remains the baseline for evaluating any tool you trust with keys.
