Ethereum opens Glamsterdam open to public testing with Platåberget launch

The Ethereum Foundation up the ante ahead on the upcoming rollout of its Glamsterdam upgrade earlier today when it announced Platåberget, a public testnet where anyone can get an preview of the upcoming upgrade before it formally goes live on mainnet.

The Foundation emphasized the urgency of early action for wallets, blockchain indexers gas estimators and any one running tools that assume a fixed maximum gas limit that will stop working correctly with the upgrade.

The Foundation pointed developers to EIP-8037, which introduces the state gas dimension, plus EIP-2780 and EIP-8038 for the decomposed costs.

According to the Ethereum Foundation, the Platåberget testnet will be up for at least a few months.

What is different about the Platåberget testnet?

The Platåberget testnet, which was built specifically for the Glamsterdam upgrade is also different from historical testnets such as Hoodi and Sepolia.

Other than that, it also expands access to the public, unlike earlier private devnets.

Another difference in Platåberget and earlier testnet versions is that it launched in mainnet’s current, with the Glamsterdam changes due to go live with a fork on August 20. That way, operators can actually simulate how the transition will look like on an active chain instead of everyone jumping aboard a chain already running the new rules.

After that, Glamsterdam will still run through a few more stages before it finally reaches Ethereum mainnet.

One of them is the community feedback and aggregation for client software, which is expected to take another month.

After that, it will then progress to the historical Sepolia and Hoodi testnets before it finally reaches Ethereum mainnet.

What will the Glamsterdam upgrade change on Ethereum?

The Glamsterdam upgrade is expected to bring changes to both of Ethereum’s layers. The big one inside proposer-builder separation (EIP-7732), shifts block building into the protocol itself.

According to Everstake, a staking provider on the network, about 88% of Ethereum blocks are assembled off-chain through MEV-Boost relays in the current setup. However, the shortfall is that validators have no protocol-level contingencies when relays censoring transactions fail to deliver.

The replacement system attests that a block arrived on schedule via -chain builder identities, signed bids and a new payload-timeliness committee.

The second big change coming with Glamsterdam is block-level access lists (EIP-7928), which record every account and storage slot a block touches, along with the resulting state.

Together, EIP-7732 and EIP-7928 set the foundation for a plan to increase gas limits from 60 million toward 200 million. The upgrade will increase the maximum deployed contract size from 24 KiB to 64 KiB and the initcode cap from 48 KiB to 128 KiB.

The Ethereum ecosystem still has one eye on the Hegotá upgrade due in 2027.

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