Ethereum opens Platåberget testnet ahead of Glamsterdam upgrade

A developer can now add the Platåberget network to Ethereum clients with one click, collect testnet ETH from a faucet and start probing the next version of the protocol. That network is Platåberget, a public testnet for Glamsterdam, the upcoming Ethereum upgrade, with its fork scheduled for August 20.

Platåberget is meant to last a few months, giving developers more time than the short-lived devnets used before it. Its validator set is relatively small but open to public deposits, so solo stakers, distributed validator technology projects and large operators can test how their systems handle validator and builder deposits. The public can submit those deposits through the Dora explorer.

Glamsterdam changes how Ethereum works beneath the applications people use. Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation changes the flow for building, proposing and validating blocks, while payload-timeliness checks add new requirements to that pipeline. Block-level access lists will record which state locations a block accesses and which changes it makes, with those lists exchanged between execution-layer peers through eth/71.

The most immediate headache may come from gas repricing. Ethereum says tools that hardcode a maximum gas limit — including wallets, indexers and gas estimators — will break and need updates. The upgrade also introduces a separate state-gas dimension for operations that create new state, such as creating an account, deploying code or writing to a new storage slot. A transfer to an existing account remains 21,000 gas, but sending funds to an account that does not yet exist incurs an additional state charge.

Concretely, this is a chance for application developers to find failures before Glamsterdam moves to Ethereum’s longer-lived Sepolia and Hoodi testnets. The upgrade also raises the maximum deployed contract size from 24KiB to 64KiB and the maximum initcode size from 48KiB to 128KiB. Platåberget is still a test environment: client releases are optional, and the Ethereum Foundation currently points operators to temporary ethPandaOps images while client teams prepare tagged releases.