The Ethereum Foundation has warned that wallets, indexers and gas estimators could break under the Glamsterdam upgrade, because it changes the fixed 21,000-gas assumption behind ordinary ETH transfers. The fork is scheduled to activate on the Platåberget testnet on Aug. 20, giving developers a window to test their software before it reaches Sepolia, Hoodi and eventually mainnet.
The Ethereum Foundation's Protocol DevOps team said on Aug. 17 that any tool relying on a hardcoded maximum gas limit "will break," naming wallets, indexers and gas estimators among the software likely to be affected. The team urged application and infrastructure developers to test their systems on Platåberget, a public testnet designed to stay online for several months.
Forkcast data shows Platåberget launched on Aug. 13, giving developers an early environment before Glamsterdam moves to Sepolia and Hoodi. The Glamsterdam fork is scheduled to activate on Platåberget on Aug. 20, according to the foundation, with public validator and builder deposits available as part of the testing process.
EIP-8037 reprices new state
A central part of the warning concerns EIP-8037, which introduces a separate state-gas dimension for operations that create new state. The foundation said creating an account, deploying code or writing a new storage slot will be metered at a fixed cost per state byte and charged at runtime.
Because of that change, a basic ETH transfer will not always carry the same gas cost. Sending ETH to an account that already exists will continue to cost 21,000 gas, split into the base transaction cost, cold account access and the value-transfer cost. Sending funds to an address that does not yet exist will also incur a state-gas charge tied to creating the new account.
Developers should therefore revisit applications that treat 21,000 gas as sufficient for every ETH transfer, the Protocol DevOps team said. Gas estimators built around only one gas dimension may also return incorrect estimates once new state is metered separately.
Glamsterdam also touches block production
Gas repricing is only one part of Glamsterdam. The foundation said the fork also includes enshrined proposer-builder separation, or ePBS, which changes how blocks are built, proposed and validated inside Ethereum's core protocol.
Block-Level Access Lists form another major component. The foundation said the lists will record state locations accessed during execution and post-transaction state changes, with BAL data exchanged between execution-layer peers through the eth/71 networking protocol. Glamsterdam will also raise the maximum deployed contract size from 24 KiB to 64 KiB, while maximum initcode size rises from 48 KiB to 128 KiB.
With Platåberget open for public participation, the Protocol DevOps team has encouraged solo stakers, distributed validator technology projects, custom software operators and large staking providers to test their infrastructure before the changes move to longer-lived networks.
Source: crypto.news
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