Glamsterdam gets a testnet you can join
Platåberget runs for months rather than days, and it breaks any tool that assumes a fixed maximum gas limit.
2 minEthereum & Layer-2
The Ethereum Foundation announced Platåberget on 17 August, a public testnet for the Glamsterdam upgrade with a small but openly joinable validator set. Unlike a devnet it is meant to live for several months, ahead of Sepolia, Hoodi and mainnet. The fork itself lands on the testnet on 20 August.
What is under test
- Enshrined proposer-builder separation, with a new builder API and payload-timeliness checks.
- Block-level access lists recording state changes.
- Gas repricings aimed at roughly a 200M gas floor.
- Contract size raised from 24KiB to 64KiB, initcode from 48KiB to 128KiB.
- Forward-compatible consensus data structures.
One line in the announcement deserves to be read twice by anyone shipping infrastructure: any tool relying on a hard-capped maximum gas limit will break and needs updating. Wallets, indexers and gas estimators are named explicitly.
A second change carries the same character. ETH transfers to new accounts now include state gas costs, so a plain send is no longer a fixed-price operation. Anything that quotes a transfer fee from a constant will quote it wrongly.
Validators and builders can submit deposits through the Dora explorer, with testnet ETH from the faucet and client images published for both layers across multiple implementations. Months of runtime is the point: the failures worth catching here are the ones that need weeks to appear.
Retold from Ethereum Foundation. This is a summary in our own words; follow the link for the original reporting.