According to the Ethereum Foundation, the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade brings major changes to both consensus and execution layers, which could disrupt existing wallets, indexers, and gas estimators. To help ecosystem devs prepare, core contributors launched the public Platåberget testnet.
Multi-dimensional gas and ePBS integration
A major highlight of the fork is a coordinated bundle of gas repricings aimed at establishing a ~200M block gas target. As a result, any tooling or infrastructure with hardcoded maximum gas limits will break without an update.
Additionally, plain ETH transfers will no longer cost 21,000 gas across the board, thus, under EIP-8037, sending funds to a non-existent account will incur an extra runtime charge for state creation (CPSB).
However, standard transfers to pre-existing accounts will retain their baseline cost.
The upgrade also bumps the maximum deployed contract size from 24 KiB to 64 KiB, while doubling the maximum initcode limit from 48 KiB to 128 KiB.
On the consensus side, Glamsterdam enshrines Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) directly into the protocol, overhauling how blocks are built and verified with new builder APIs and Payload Timeliness Checks (PTC). It also mandates Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) to track state accesses separate from the block body.
What's next on the roadmap
The Glamsterdam activation on the Platåberget testnet is scheduled for August 20. Devs have opened public validator deposits and enabled a faucet so solo stakers and node operators can test their setups in advance.
Once feedback is baked in, the team will launch a dedicated non-finality devnet to stress-test edge cases. Upgrades to long-lived testnets Sepolia and Hoodi will follow shortly after, clearing the path for the ultimate rollout on the Ethereum mainnet.
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