Ethereum Launches Glamsterdam Testnet; Tools with Hardcoded Gas Limits Must Be Updated

Author: Ethereum Foundation

Compiled by Deep潮 TechFlow

DeepChain Overview: Ethereum’s upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade brings a dual restructuring of block construction and gas fee calculation—any wallets, indexers, or estimators with hardcoded gas limits will fail immediately. The foundation has prematurely launched a public testnet, giving developers a several-month window, but time waits for no one.

tl;dr: Meet Platåberget: the early test environment for the Glamsterdam (Gloas + Amsterdam) upgrade, now open to the public. This upgrade introduces breaking changes for application developers—specifically, any tools relying on hard-coded maximum gas limits (such as wallets, indexers, and gas estimators) will stop working and require updates. Take advantage of this early opportunity to test!

Platåberget is a short-term testnet designed to allow the community to test upcoming changes. Unlike previous short-lived developer networks, Platåberget is planned to run for several months, providing the community with a stable environment to experience Ethereum after Glamsterdam and to gain opportunities for testing and experimentation before Glamsterdam deploys to the longer-term testnets Sepolia and Hoodi.

The Glamsterdam upgrade brings significant changes to both the consensus and execution layers. Highlights include:

Built-in proposer-builder separation: This is a major change to how blocks are built, proposed, and validated, incorporating new builder API workflows and PTC (Payload Timeliness) checks. Infrastructure that relies on the block production and validation pipeline should expect to be affected.

Block-level access list: Introduces a mandatory block-level access list that records accessed state locations and subsequent changes after transactions. The block-level access list is stored separately from the block body and can be exchanged between execution layer nodes via eth/71.

Gas re-pricing: This is a coordinated set of Gas cost adjustments aimed at bringing the Gas floor to approximately 200 million. Any tools with hard-coded maximum Gas limits will be affected.

Larger contracts and initialization code: Increased the maximum deployable contract size from 24 KiB to 64 KiB, and the maximum initialization code size from 48 KiB to 128 KiB.

Forward-compatible consensus data structure

The validator set at Platåberget is relatively small but openly accessible. Anyone can deposit new validators and test their own validator and builder deposit processes. ePBS represents a significant change to the consensus layer, and we aim to ensure that all independent stakers, DVT projects, custom software solutions, and large-scale operators have ample opportunity to test their infrastructure. The Glamsterdam fork on the testnet is scheduled for August 20, providing sufficient time to deposit and prepare for the fork transition.

Another major change in Glamsterdam is the gas repricing. These changes will affect a broad audience, as they impact every wallet, indexer, and gas estimator on the network. Use this opportunity to identify which tools or assumptions in your system may break before the fork goes live on mainnet.

The complete list of included EIPs is tracked in Glamsterdam Meta EIP-7773.

Visit the Platåberget resources page for summaries of the included EIPs, client support, and launch status; review the devnet-8 specification for network settings, configuration values, bootnodes, and client release information.

The Platåberget page provides a one-click network setup process to configure your EL and CL clients, along with a faucet offering testnet ETH for covering deposit and gas fees.

Keep the following points in mind when running a node:

The public will be able to submit validator or builder deposits through the Dora browser.

The genesis validator set will not pre-allocate automatic staking to a few entities; instead, it will be guided by public deposits and supplemented with some ETH at genesis to help initiate the network.

Client release: Releases for each client are optional; please verify whether your selected client includes this version.

Until the client team prepares a labeled release version, please use our ethPandaOps container image below.

If you find any errors or issues in the specifications, the best channel for feedback is the Ethereum R&D Discord server. If you prefer not to use Discord, you can also submit feedback to the following specification repositories: Consensus Layer, Execution Layer, execution-apis, builder-specs, and beacon-APIs.

Platåberget provided the community with the opportunity to experience Ethereum after Glamsterdam and begin identifying issues.

Gas repricing is especially important for application developers: any tools relying on hardcoded maximum gas limits—such as wallets, indexers, and gas estimators—will break and require updates. We encourage dApp and wallet developers to test alongside infrastructure operators on Platåberget, as this type of change is most likely to catch downstream tools off guard.

Repricing involves more than just the block gas limit: the cost of individual operations also changes, and EIP-8037 introduces a separate state gas dimension for operations that create new state. Creating an account, deploying code, or writing to a new storage slot is now metered at a fixed cost per state byte (CPSB), charged at runtime rather than upfront. The practical consequence is that standard ETH transfers are no longer always a fixed 21,000 gas: transfers to existing accounts still cost 21,000 (now broken down into TXBASECOST + COLDACCOUNTACCESS + TXVALUECOST), but sending funds to a non-existent account incurs additional state gas fees at runtime equal to STATEBYTESPERNEWACCOUNT × CPSB. Any system assuming that 21,000 gas covers all transfers, or estimating based on a single gas dimension, must be revisited: see EIP-2780 for the breakdown of intrinsic costs, and EIP-8038 for increased state access costs.

Within one month of integrating feedback into the client software and specifications, a non-final developer network will be rolled out to test extreme consensus scenarios.

After these development networks have operated stably for some time, the existing long-term testnets (Sepolia, Holesky) will undergo the Glamsterdam fork. Once they complete the upgrade and remain stable, the next step will be the transition of the Ethereum mainnet to Glamsterdam 🎊.

For those who want to track progress in more detail, the best channels are the Ethereum R&D Discord server, the All Core Devs calls, the Glamsterdam upgrade tracker, or the Glamsterdam development network GitHub repository by EthPandaOps.

Platåberget see 🐻‍❄️!