Platåberget Goes Live as Glamsterdam's Public Testnet

Ethereum's next upgrade got a long-lived home on Monday. The Ethereum Foundation announced Platåberget, the public testnet for the Glamsterdam fork, in a blog post dated 17 August. Validators can join now, with public deposits handled through the Dora block explorer, and the fork itself is scheduled to activate on the testnet on 20 August. Glamsterdam itself is a blended name, Gloas plus Amsterdam, covering the fork's consensus and execution halves. The numbered devnets that came before this lived for days or weeks each. Platåberget is designed to run for months, carrying Glamsterdam the rest of the way toward mainnet.

The network tests five component sets at once. ePBS, enshrined proposer-builder separation, moves the split between the validators who propose blocks and the specialists who assemble them into the protocol itself, with new builder APIs and payload-timeliness checks. Block-level access lists have each block declare up front which state it touches, so clients can execute transactions in parallel; they travel over a new eth/71 networking protocol. A coordinated set of gas repricings is meant to make a floor of roughly 200M gas per block safe. The maximum contract size quadruples to 64KiB, with the initcode limit rising to 128KiB. The repricings also add a state-gas dimension, and with it a plain ETH transfer no longer always costs a flat 21,000 gas. Forward-compatible consensus data structures round out the set.

What breaks and for whom

The Foundation is blunt about the tooling fallout.

"Any tool that relies on a hardcapped maximum gas limit (think wallets, indexers and gas estimators) will break," the post warns.

The transfer change is the quieter hazard. A 21,000-gas send has been a constant since the chain launched, and any wallet that hardcodes it will misestimate fees once state gas applies. Client images are published for seven consensus-layer and seven execution-layer implementations, with the network configuration public from day one. Because deposits are open, outside operators can run validators through the fork's full lifecycle, not only the client teams. That breadth is the point. A testnet built to last months exists so that wallets, indexers and estimators can fail here first, on a network where nothing of value is at stake.

A gas floor that moved down

The 200M target is a retreat from Devnet-7, which ran a 300M gas limit in July. The all-core-devs call on 30 July had gated this fork on repricing benchmarks, and the public testnet arrives about two and a half weeks after that decision, with the more conservative floor attached. Either figure is a large multiple of mainnet's current capacity. Nor is the capacity push Ethereum's alone this summer: Solana raised its block compute limit 66% in late July, and Cardano published a two-phase upgrade roadmap of its own over the weekend.

The road from here

The Foundation's published sequence runs in stages. Platåberget comes first. A non-finality devnet, stress-testing how the chain behaves when finality stalls, is planned within the month. The existing Sepolia and Hoodi testnets fork after that, and mainnet comes last. No mainnet date is attached. The months-long design is an admission of how much this fork touches, from block building to gas metering, and the Foundation evidently prefers finding the breakage on a network built to absorb it. The first checkpoint is already set: Glamsterdam activates on Platåberget on Thursday, three days after the network opened its doors.