Ethereum’s 200-Million-Gas Upgrade Test Starts August 20 on Public Network

The Ethereum Foundation opened Platåberget on 17 August 2026 as a public testnet for the Glamsterdam upgrade. The chain started under current mainnet rules. On 20 August it executes a hard fork that applies the new protocol. Developers, wallet teams and node operators can join, deposit test validators and probe the changes before they reach Sepolia, Hoodi and mainnet. Glamsterdam combines the Gloas consensus package and the Amsterdam execution package. Its target is a gas-limit floor of about 200 million, up from roughly 60 million today.

Platåberget Starts Under Current Mainnet Rules

The testnet launched from a state that matches Ethereum’s present execution and consensus rules. Operators therefore watch the transition itself rather than arriving after the new rules are already live. The validator set is small and publicly joinable. Deposits for validators and builders go through the network explorer. Client images and a faucet are published on the official resources page.

The Ethereum Foundation announcement states the fork is scheduled for 20 August so participants have time to make deposits and prepare. Platåberget is intended to run for several months. After it stabilizes, the same upgrade moves to the longer-lived Sepolia and Hoodi testnets, then to mainnet, now targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026 after an earlier first-half window slipped.

ePBS, Access Lists and the 200M Gas Floor

Three changes carry most of the load.

• EIP-7732 (enshrined proposer-builder separation) moves the proposer-builder hand-off into the protocol. The proposer signs a header; a builder later reveals the execution payload. A payload-timeliness committee checks that the reveal arrives on time. The change extends the data-propagation window from about two seconds to about nine.
• EIP-7928 requires every block to carry a complete map of the accounts and storage slots it will touch, plus the resulting state. Nodes can prefetch data and execute non-conflicting transactions in parallel.
• A bundle of gas repricings, including EIP-8037, introduces a separate state-gas dimension metered at a fixed cost per state byte. The package is designed to support a 200 million gas floor without unbounded state growth.

Maximum deployed contract size rises from 24 KiB to 64 KiB. Maximum initcode size rises from 48 KiB to 128 KiB. The full EIP list sits in meta EIP-7773.

Tools Built on 21,000 Gas Will Fail

The Foundation’s notice is specific. Any wallet, indexer or gas estimator that hard-codes a maximum gas limit or treats a plain ether transfer as a constant 21,000 gas will produce wrong results. Transfers to an existing account still cost 21,000 gas, now decomposed into base, access and value components. Transfers that create a new account incur additional state gas at runtime.

Those assumptions have been in wallets since Ethereum’s earliest days. The new state-gas dimension and the higher size limits will also affect contract-deployment tools. The testnet exists so those failures appear now, not on mainnet.

Ethereum traded near $1,922 on 19 August. Price has moved in a roughly $1,850–$1,950 range through the month. The engineering schedule, not the market, will determine when the same rules reach the live chain.

Conclusion

Platåberget is the first public network where the 200 million gas target, in-protocol builder separation and the new fee model run together on a populated chain. The fork on 20 August will show whether clients, builders and wallets can complete the transition without silent failures. Only after that period of public testing will Glamsterdam advance to Sepolia and Hoodi, and only then to mainnet. The next months will decide which tools survive and which must be rewritten before the upgrade leaves the lab.