The Ethereum Foundation has launched Platåberget, a public testnet created specifically for the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, giving developers and infrastructure operators an early preview before the changes reach Ethereum mainnet. The testnet went live on August 17 and will execute the Glamsterdam fork on August 20, allowing participants to simulate how the transition will look on an active chain rather than joining a network already running the new rules.
The Foundation stressed the urgency of early preparation, particularly for wallets, blockchain indexers, gas estimators, and any tools that assume a fixed maximum gas limit. Those assumptions will no longer work correctly after the upgrade. Developers were pointed to EIP-8037, which introduces the state gas dimension, as well as EIP-2780 and EIP-8038 for decomposed costs. Platåberget is expected to remain available for at least a few months.
Glamsterdam will bring significant changes to both of Ethereum’s layers. The most notable is protocol-level proposer-builder separation through EIP-7732, shifting block building into the protocol itself. According to staking provider Everstake, about 88% of Ethereum blocks are currently assembled off-chain through MEV-Boost relays, leaving validators without protocol-level fallbacks if relays fail or censor transactions. The new system introduces on-chain builder identities, signed bids, and a payload-timeliness committee to verify that blocks arrive on schedule.
The second major change is EIP-7928, which introduces block-level access lists recording every account and storage slot a block touches along with the resulting state. Together, EIP-7732 and EIP-7928 lay the foundation for raising Ethereum’s gas limit from 60 million toward 200 million. The upgrade will also increase the maximum deployed contract size from 24 KiB to 64 KiB and the initcode cap from 48 KiB to 128 KiB.
Before reaching mainnet, Glamsterdam will pass through a period of community feedback and client software updates expected to last about one month, followed by testing on the historical Sepolia and Hoodi testnets. The Ethereum ecosystem is also looking ahead to the Hegotá upgrade expected in 2027.
