A plain ETH transfer will not always cost 21,000 gas after the Glamsterdam upgrade.
Platåberget is Ethereum's new public Testnet for finding assumptions like this before Mainnet.
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Platåberget is different from the other short-lived Glamsterdam Devnets that came before it.
It is public, has a small joinable validator set, and is expected to run for a few months. The Glamsterdam fork is scheduled for August 20 on the network.
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When does a plain transfer cost more?
Sending ETH to an existing account still uses 21,000 gas. However, sending it to an address that does not yet initiated also pays a state-creation charge at runtime.
That first funding transaction creates a new state.
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This exception has a wide blast radius.
Any wallet, indexer, gas estimator, or other tool that assumes 21,000 gas covers every transfer needs updating, and so does tooling that hardcodes a maximum block gas limit.
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Why change the gas model at all?
Glamsterdam aims to scale Ethereum L1 toward a minimum block gas limit of roughly 200M. Getting there safely means pricing work closer to the resources it consumes, especially when accessing or creating state.
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EIP-8037 handles the state-creation side.
Creating an account, deploying code, or filling a fresh storage slot is charged by the amount of new state added. This separate meter helps Ethereum increase throughput without letting state growth run unchecked.
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Gas repricing is only one part of the scaling plan.
BALs (Block-Level Access Lists) record the accounts and storage locations accessed during a block, plus their resulting values. That map lets clients parallelize reads, validation, and state calculation.
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The consensus side changes too.
ePBS (Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) brings block builders into Ethereum's protocol. Builders commit to payloads, proposers select them, and a committee checks if they arrive on time.
So, block-production infrastructure must adapt.
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Developers also get more room for complex contracts.
Glamsterdam raises the deployed contract-size limit from 24 KiB to 64 KiB, and the limit for contract-deployment code, or initcode, from 48 KiB to 128 KiB.
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Who should be testing?
dApps, wallets, indexers, gas estimators, solo stakers, distributed validator technology projects, builders, and node operators should be actively involved.
Platåberget supports public validator and builder deposits for hands-on testing.
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Platåberget is an early rehearsal.
Next comes a non-finality Devnet for consensus edge cases, then Glamsterdam on Sepolia and Hoodi. Mainnet follows only after those networks are stable.
Read the full announcement below.
blog.ethereum.org/2026/08/17/plataberget-testnet
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