The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol DevOps team has alerted developers that certain wallets, indexers, gas estimators and decentralized applications could stop functioning correctly once the Glamsterdam upgrade takes effect. The warning centers on software that depends on hardcoded maximum gas limits or assumes a uniform cost for every ether transfer.

Any tool built around a fixed gas ceiling will break and must be revised, the team stated. Developers were instructed to examine and update their systems without delay to avoid service interruptions when the changes reach production networks.

New State-Gas Metric Alters Transaction Costs

At the core of the compatibility risk is EIP-8037, which adds a separate state-gas dimension for operations that create new state on the network. Under the revised model, a standard ether transfer to an existing account continues to cost 21,000 gas. Sending ether to an address that does not yet exist, however, incurs an additional state-gas charge tied to account creation.

Wallets, online indexers and fee-estimation tools that treat every transfer as a 21,000-gas operation or calculate costs along a single gas dimension will produce incorrect results unless they are modified. The foundation recommended that developers review every line of logic related to gas calculation and test the revised code thoroughly.

The broader gas-repricing package is designed around a higher gas floor near 200 million and adjusts the relative price of individual operations. Computation is expected to become relatively cheaper while permanent state growth becomes more expensive.

Platåberget Testnet Opens for Public Testing

To give the community an early testing environment, the foundation launched Platåberget, a public testnet built specifically for Glamsterdam. The network became available in mid-August and is scheduled to remain online for several months. The Glamsterdam fork itself is set to activate on Platåberget on August 20.

Unlike earlier private development networks, Platåberget starts from the current mainnet rules and then applies the upgrade through a live fork. This approach lets operators observe the transition on an active chain rather than joining a network that already runs the new parameters. Public validator and builder deposits are supported, allowing solo stakers, staking providers and infrastructure operators to participate.

After feedback from Platåberget is incorporated, the upgrade is expected to move to a non-finality development network, then to the longer-lived Sepolia and Hoodi testnets, and finally to Ethereum mainnet once client teams confirm stability.

Additional Protocol Changes in Glamsterdam

Beyond the gas model, Glamsterdam introduces several structural updates. Enshrined proposer-builder separation brings the division between block building and block proposing into the core protocol, complete with signed bids and a payload-timeliness committee. This replaces the current reliance on external relays for the majority of blocks.

Block-level access lists will record every account and storage slot touched by a block together with the resulting state. The lists travel separately from the block body and are intended to enable more efficient parallel processing and data preloading.

Contract size limits also expand. The maximum size for deployed contracts rises from 24 KiB to 64 KiB, while the limit for initialization code increases from 48 KiB to 128 KiB. These adjustments support larger and more complex smart contracts.

The foundation has made client container images available for both consensus and execution clients so that operators can begin testing immediately. Developers of wallets, indexers, gas tools and related infrastructure are the primary groups urged to use the testnet now, before the changes progress further toward mainnet.