The Ethereum Foundation announced Platåberget, a public testnet that will let developers and other users preview the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade before it goes live on mainnet.

The Foundation said the testnet is intended to give wallet providers, blockchain indexers, gas estimators and anyone else running tools that assume a fixed maximum gas limit time to prepare, because those tools may stop working correctly after the upgrade. That makes the testnet a practical checkpoint for infrastructure teams that need to verify their software still tracks Ethereum’s changing execution rules.

Developers were also pointed to EIP-8037, which introduces the state gas dimension, along with EIP-2780 and EIP-8038 for decomposed costs.

According to the Ethereum Foundation, Platåberget will remain available for at least a few months.

What is different about the Platåberget testnet?

Platåberget was built specifically for the Glamsterdam upgrade and differs from historical testnets such as Hoodi and Sepolia. It also broadens access to the public, unlike earlier private devnets.

Another difference is that Platåberget launched on mainnet’s current state, with the Glamsterdam changes due to go live with a fork on August 20. This setup allows operators to simulate how the transition will look on an active chain rather than joining a chain that is already running the new rules.

After that, Glamsterdam will still go through several more stages before it reaches Ethereum mainnet.

One of those stages is community feedback and aggregation for client software, which is expected to take another month. After that, the upgrade will move 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 affect both layers of Ethereum. The major change on proposer-builder separation, EIP-7732, moves block building into the protocol itself.

According to Everstake, a staking provider on the network, about 88% of Ethereum blocks are currently assembled off-chain through MEV-Boost relays. The drawback is that validators have no protocol-level fallback when relays censor transactions or fail to deliver.

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

The second major change in 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 are intended to lay the groundwork for increasing gas limits from 60 million toward 200 million. The upgrade will also raise the maximum deployed contract size from 24 KiB to 64 KiB and the initcode cap from 48 KiB to 128 KiB.

The Ethereum ecosystem is also keeping an eye on the Hegotá upgrade, which is due in 2027.