The Ethereum Foundation has warned that parts of the ecosystem could require significant updates before the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade reaches Ethereum’s longer-lived testnets and eventually mainnet.
In an Aug. 17 announcement, the Foundation introduced Platåberget, a public testnet designed to give developers and infrastructure operators an early environment for testing Glamsterdam. The Ethereum Foundation specifically warned that tools relying on a hardcoded maximum gas limit could break and need to be updated.
The warning is particularly relevant to wallets, indexers and gas-estimation software, which often rely on assumptions about how Ethereum calculates and limits transaction costs.
Ethereum Foundation: Platåberget Testnet announcement
Glamsterdam introduces two-dimensional gas accounting
One of the most significant changes comes from EIP-8037, which changes how Ethereum accounts for operations that create new blockchain state.
The proposal introduces separate regular-gas and state-gas dimensions. State creation costs, such as creating accounts, deploying contracts and writing new storage, will be measured separately from ordinary execution costs.
This means Ethereum transactions can no longer be evaluated using a single gas metric in every situation.
For example, a transfer to an existing account can continue to use the familiar 21,000-gas structure. However, sending ETH to an account that does not yet exist can incur an additional state-gas charge under the new model.
The change could therefore affect applications that assume every basic ETH transfer has the same gas requirements.
Wallets and gas estimators face compatibility changes
The Ethereum Foundation said developers should use Platåberget to identify infrastructure problems before Glamsterdam moves to longer-lived networks.
Gas-estimation logic is particularly important. Applications using eth_estimateGas will need to correctly account for the updated state-creation costs and multidimensional gas accounting.
The official EIP-8037 specification explicitly says wallet developers and node operators must update gas-estimation handling to accommodate the new model.
This could affect a wide range of Ethereum infrastructure, including:
The Foundation's warning is therefore broader than a simple change to the network's block gas limit.
Platåberget provides an early testing environment
Platåberget is intended to operate for several months, giving developers more time to test Glamsterdam before the changes reach Ethereum’s longer-lived Sepolia and Hoodi testnets.
The Ethereum Foundation said the Glamsterdam fork on Platåberget is scheduled for Aug. 20, providing infrastructure teams with an opportunity to test their systems before the transition.
The testnet also allows validators, builders, solo stakers, distributed validator technology projects and other infrastructure operators to test changes associated with Glamsterdam.
Glamsterdam goes beyond gas repricing
Gas accounting is only one part of the upgrade.
The official Glamsterdam Meta EIP currently lists several major changes scheduled for inclusion, including enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS), block-level access lists, additional gas repricing measures, larger contract limits and the state-creation changes introduced by EIP-8037.
The upgrade is therefore expected to affect both Ethereum's execution and consensus layers.
Enshrined proposer-builder separation changes how blocks are constructed, proposed and validated, while block-level access lists are designed to provide more information about state access within blocks.
Glamsterdam also increases the maximum deployed contract size from 24 KiB to 64 KiB and the maximum initialization-code size from 48 KiB to 128 KiB, according to the Ethereum Foundation.
Why the gas changes matter for Ethereum's scaling roadmap
The broader goal behind the gas repricing work is to better align Ethereum's gas costs with the resources required to process and maintain the network.
EIP-8037 establishes a fixed cost per state byte and separates state-growth costs from regular execution costs. The proposal is designed to address long-term state growth while helping create room for future scaling.
However, these changes also mean developers cannot assume that existing gas-estimation logic will remain accurate after the upgrade.
That is why the Ethereum Foundation is encouraging application developers to test early rather than waiting until Glamsterdam reaches Ethereum's production environment.
What happens next for Glamsterdam?
Platåberget is now the main public testing ground for developers preparing for Glamsterdam. Once the new implementations and specifications have been tested and stabilized, Ethereum plans to move the upgrade through longer-lived testnets before eventually deploying it on mainnet.
For users, the transition should largely happen behind the scenes. Wallets and infrastructure providers will be responsible for updating their software to correctly handle the new gas model.
For developers, however, the message from the Ethereum Foundation is clear: testing should begin now.
Glamsterdam introduces some of Ethereum's most significant changes to gas accounting and block infrastructure in recent upgrades. Ensuring wallets, RPC services, indexers and other tools are compatible before deployment will be critical to avoiding disruptions across the Ethereum ecosystem.
