The Ethereum developer community has taken a major step toward its next major network overhaul with the launch of Platåberget, a public-facing testing ground for the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade. Combining the codenames Gloas and Amsterdam, Platåberget represents a crucial transition from short-lived developer nets to a stable, multi-month testing environment open to the wider public, including solo stakers, distributed validator technology (DVT) projects, and application developers.
Unlike previous devnets designed strictly for core protocol developers to iron out initial bugs, Platåberget is intended to run for several months. This extended timeline provides a stable venue for the community to experiment with post-Glamsterdam Ethereum, giving infrastructure operators and developers an opportunity to test and break things before the upgrade eventually migrates to Ethereum’s longer-lived testnets, Sepolia and Hoodi, and ultimately the mainnet.
The rollout of Platåberget is scheduled to undergo its official Glamsterdam fork on August 20th. Ahead of this transition, the network features a relatively small but publicly joinable validator set. This open design allows anyone to deposit a new validator and test both their validator workflows and builder deposit mechanisms. Because Enclabs and ePBS (Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) represent a substantial shift to the consensus layer, core developers are keen to ensure that solo stakers, custom software providers, and large-scale operators have ample opportunity to stress-test their infrastructure.
What’s in the Glamsterdam Fork
The Glamsterdam upgrade brings sweeping modifications across both the consensus and execution layers of the Ethereum protocol. A comprehensive catalog of the included Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) is being tracked under the Glamsterdam meta EIP-7773.
While consensus layer modifications will heavily engage stakers and node operators, another major pillar of the upgrade—gas repricings—will affect a far broader audience. These adjustments touch every single wallet, indexer, and gas estimator operating on the network. Developers are strongly encouraged to use the Platåberget window to identify any tooling or underlying assumptions that might break in their systems before the upgrade goes live on the mainnet.
The gas repricings extend well beyond simple adjustments to the block gas limit. Individual operations are seeing structural price changes, most notably through EIP-8037, which introduces a separate state gas dimension for operations that create new state. Under this new framework, creating an account, deploying smart contract code, or writing to a fresh storage slot is metered at a fixed cost per state byte (CPSB). Rather than being charged entirely upfront, this state-creation cost is calculated at runtime.
The practical consequence of this change is that a plain ETH transfer will no longer always carry a flat 21,000 gas fee. While transfers to an account that already exists will continue to cost 21,000 gas—now formally decomposed into transaction base cost, cold account access, and transaction value cost—sending funds to an account that does not yet exist will incur an additional runtime fee calculated as the state bytes per new account multiplied by the CPSB. Any existing application logic that assumes a flat 21,000 gas covers every transfer, or relies on a single gas dimension during estimation, will need to be thoroughly revised. Developers can review EIP-2780 for details on the decomposed intrinsic cost and EIP-8038 for the associated state-access increases.
Using Platåberget
To facilitate participation, the Ethereum infrastructure team EthPandaOps has established comprehensive resources through the Platåberget resources page, which outlines included EIPs, client support status, and launch parameters. Detailed network settings, configuration values, bootnodes, and client release information are also available via the devnet specification documentation.
The main Platåberget portal offers a convenient one-click mechanism to configure execution and consensus layer clients, accompanied by a dedicated testnet faucet to supply developers with test ETH for covering deposits and transaction gas fees. While client teams prepare their final tagged releases, official container images provided by EthPandaOps are available for running nodes. Supported consensus layer clients include Lighthouse, Lodestar, Nimbus, Prysm, Teku, and Grandine. On the execution layer, supported clients comprise Besu, Geth, Erigon, Nethermind, Reth, Nimbus EL, and Ethrex.
Support, Feedback, and Next Steps
The developer community has designated the Ethereum R&D Discord server as the primary venue for reporting bugs or discussing specification issues. Alternatively, feedback can be submitted directly through the respective GitHub repositories covering consensus specs, execution specs, execution APIs, builder specs, and beacon APIs.
The launch of Platåberget marks the beginning of a deliberate, phased rollout strategy for Glamsterdam. Application and wallet developers are especially urged to test their software against the network alongside infrastructure operators, as execution-layer changes like gas repricings and hardcapped maximum gas limits are most likely to catch downstream tooling off guard. Tools relying on hardcapped limits will inevitably break and require immediate updates.
Once community feedback has been successfully integrated into client software and protocol specifications, a non-finality devnet will follow within the month to test pathological consensus scenarios. After these devnets demonstrate stability over a sustained period, the upgrade path will proceed to Ethereum’s existing long-lived testnets, Sepolia and Hoodi. Only after those environments have successfully upgraded and stabilized will the core development team prepare for the ultimate transition of the Ethereum mainnet to Glamsterdam.
Stakeholders wishing to follow the upgrade’s progress in greater detail can monitor the Ethereum R&D Discord server, tune into the All Core Dev calls, track milestones on the Glamsterdam upgrade portal, or review developments directly within the EthPandaOps GitHub repositories.
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