The Ethereum Foundation opened Platåberget, a public testnet for trying out the next major update, Glamsterdam, in advance, on August 17. The test network first runs under the same rules as the current Ethereum mainnet, and switches to Glamsterdam's new rules on August 20. The design is meant to allow observation of errors that may arise at the moment the upgrade takes effect.
The core change is separating, within the Ethereum protocol, the role of the validator that finally proposes a block from that of the "builder" that gathers transactions and constructs the block. A feature that verifies transactions more efficiently by including a list of which accounts and storage each block used is also being introduced. Gas is divided into "execution gas" used for computation and "state gas" charged when data is newly stored, and the cost of creating new accounts and storage rises sharply.
The maximum size of smart contract code increases from 24KiB to 64KiB. Wallets, data query services, and fee estimation tools that assume a block's maximum gas limit is a fixed value, or that calculate gas as a single number, may cause transaction failures or malfunctions if they are not updated. The base cost of 21,000 gas for sending ether to an existing account is maintained, but if a new account is created on the receiving side, state gas is added.
Developers plan to run a separate devnet test within a month after Platåberget that deliberately creates a situation in which block finalization halts. They will then verify on the Sepolia and Hoodi testnets as well. Glamsterdam, whose schedule has slipped from the original plan, currently targets the fourth quarter of 2026 for mainnet deployment, but a specific date has not yet been set.