Trial gallop. The Ethereum Foundation has opened Platåberget, a public testnet dedicated to Glamsterdam. Launched in a state close to that of the current mainnet, it will activate the new protocol rules on August 20, 2026. Unlike the private and temporary devnets used so far, Platåberget must remain operational for several months, until the deployment of Glamsterdam on the mainnet. The goal is to allow client developers, validators, stakers, builders and infrastructure providers to test the upgrade in a stable and open environment.
Key Points
The Ethereum Foundation opens Platåberget, first public testnet dedicated to the Glamsterdam upgrade, with fork scheduled for August 20
Glamsterdam embeds the ePBS (EIP-7732), which includes the separation of the provider/manufacturer in the protocol and reduces dependence on MEV-Boost relays
Block-level access lists (EIP-7928) should enable parallel execution of transactions and prepare for a gas limit hike
A new channel rather than a busy testnet: the lesson of Holešky's loss of finality during the Pectra tests in February 2025
Ethereum network: Platåberget opens Glamsterdam tests to the public
The name of the testnet comes from a mountain plateau located in Svalbard, Norway. Its genesis took place on August 13, a few days before its public opening. The network is voluntarily starting with current Ethereum rules in order to reproduce a real transition during the hard fork scheduled for August 20.
Platåberget is not primarily intended for developers of dApps and smart contracts, who can continue to use Sepolia. Above all, it must test the components most directly affected by Glamsterdam: execution and consensus clients, nodes, staking tools, block builders, indexers, wallets and fee estimators.
The network has its own faucet to distribute test ETH. The validator and builder repositories are also open to the public. Each implementation must demonstrate that it applies the new rules without causing divergence or a breakdown in consensus.
ePBS, parallel execution and increased gas limit
Glamsterdam combines Gloas, for the consensus layer, and Amsterdam, for the execution layer. Its main development on the consensus side is ePBS, or enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (EIP-7732).
The separation between the validator who proposes a block and the actor who builds it already exists, but relies largely on external tools like MEV-Boost and its relays. The ePBS must integrate this mechanism directly into the Ethereum protocol, with new rules allowing in particular to verify that the content of the block has been published on time.
On the execution side, block-level access lists, or BALs (EIP-7928), indicate in advance which parts of the state will be used. The nodes will thus be able to prepare the necessary data and execute more operations in parallel.
This optimization must accompany a significant increase in network capacity, with a gas limit that could reach a floor of around 200 million. Several gas costs will be re-evaluated to prevent this increase in capacity from leading to too rapid accumulation of data that the nodes must retain. Simple transfers could thus become cheaper, while operations creating new data sustainably would cost more.
Glamsterdam also plans to increase the maximum size of deployed contracts from 24 to 64 KiB and that of their initialization code from 48 to 128 KiB. These changes may break some tools still using hardcoded limits.
