Ethereum has opened Platåberget, a public short-term testnet designed to give the community an early place to test the upcoming Glamsterdam network upgrade before it reaches longer-lived Ethereum testnets. The network is intended to run for a few months, making it more persistent than earlier short-lived devnets and allowing infrastructure teams, developers and validators to experiment with post-Glamsterdam conditions.
The Ethereum Foundation said the testnet includes breaking changes for application developers, with gas repricing identified as the most immediate issue. Tools that depend on a hardcoded maximum gas limit, including some wallets, indexers and gas estimators, may fail unless they are updated.
Fork features touch both execution and consensus
Glamsterdam includes changes across Ethereum’s execution and consensus layers. Among the headline items are enshrined proposer-builder separation, or ePBS, which alters how blocks are built, proposed and validated and introduces a new builder API flow along with payload-timeliness checks.
The fork also adds block-level access lists, which record accessed state locations and post-transaction changes. According to the announcement, those lists are stored separately from the block body and can be exchanged between execution-layer peers through eth/71.
Other planned changes include a coordinated package of gas cost adjustments aimed at an approximately 200 million gas floor, larger limits for deployed contract size and initcode, and forward-compatible consensus data structures. The full set of included proposals is being tracked in the Glamsterdam meta EIP-7773.
Validator participation is open on the testnet
Platåberget has a relatively small validator set, but it is publicly joinable. Ethereum said anyone can deposit a new validator and use the environment to test validator and builder deposit workflows before the upgrade activates on the network.
The Glamsterdam fork on Platåberget is scheduled for Aug. 20. The Foundation said the testnet is meant to give solo stakers, distributed validator technology projects, custom software teams and large-scale operators time to make deposits and prepare their infrastructure for the transition.
Rather than assigning automatic stake to a small group at launch, the genesis validator set is being bootstrapped from public deposits, with some ETH allocated at genesis to help start the network. Public users are also able to submit validator or builder deposits through the Dora explorer.
Gas repricing may expose hidden assumptions
The announcement places special emphasis on gas repricing because it affects a broader set of downstream tools than many consensus changes. Ethereum warned that any system built around a fixed maximum gas limit should be reviewed before Glamsterdam reaches mainnet.
The changes are not limited to the block gas limit. The post says individual operations are also being repriced, while EIP-8037 introduces a separate state-gas dimension for actions that create new state. Creating an account, deploying code or writing a fresh storage slot would be metered at a fixed cost per state byte and charged at runtime.
One practical consequence is that a simple ETH transfer is no longer guaranteed to fit the same assumptions in every case. Transfers to an already existing account still cost 21,000 gas, but transfers to an account that does not yet exist would incur additional state-gas charges at runtime. Ethereum said any software that assumes every transfer costs 21,000 gas, or that relies on a single gas dimension for estimation, needs to be revisited.
What comes after Platåberget
Ethereum is directing users to Platåberget network resources and the devnet-8 specification for configuration details, bootnodes, network settings and client support. The project also said a one-click Add Network flow is available for execution- and consensus-layer clients, and a faucet provides testnet ETH for deposits and gas.
For now, Ethereum recommends using ethPandaOps container images while client teams prepare tagged releases, noting that official client releases for the network are optional and may vary by team.
The Foundation said feedback from Platåberget will feed into later testing stages. After issues are incorporated into client software and specifications, a non-finality devnet is expected within the month to test difficult consensus scenarios. If those devnets remain stable, Glamsterdam would then move to Sepolia and Hoodi before any eventual transition on Ethereum mainnet.
Source: blog.ethereum.org