On August 17, the Ethereum Foundation announced Platåberget, a public testnet for the Glamsterdam upgrade, where wallet, dApp, and Ethereum infrastructure development teams can test changes early before they are deployed to Sepolia, Hoodi, and eventually mainnet. Alongside the Platåberget fork scheduled for August 20, the Foundation warned that tools relying on hardcoded gas limits may fail, including the common assumption around the 21,000 gas limit for ETH transfers.
Glamsterdam Enters Public Testing With a Warning for Wallets
Platåberget was introduced by the Ethereum Foundation as the first public test environment for Glamsterdam, an upgrade combining Gloas at the consensus layer and Amsterdam at the execution layer. Unlike previous short-lived devnets, this testnet is expected to run for several months, giving wallet, dApp, and infrastructure teams more time to test changes under more stable conditions.
The Glamsterdam fork on Platåberget is scheduled for August 20, 2026. If testing proceeds without major issues, Ethereum will move forward with deploying the upgrade to long-term testnets such as Sepolia and Hoodi before considering mainnet. The Ethereum Foundation has not yet announced a mainnet activation date for Glamsterdam.
A key point emphasized by the Foundation is gas repricing, a set of changes that could cause tooling assumptions to deviate the most. Wallets, indexers, and gas estimators that previously hardcoded gas limits or treated gas as a simple single variable will need to recheck their logic on Platåberget.
Why the 21,000-Gas Assumption Is No Longer Universal
In Ethereum today, 21,000 gas is a familiar benchmark for a basic ETH transfer: no calldata, no complex smart contract calls. Many wallets use this number in flows like “send max” or “empty wallet” to calculate the remaining ETH balance after fees.
In the Platåberget announcement, the Ethereum Foundation clarified that transferring ETH to an existing account will still incur a 21,000 gas fee. However, if a transaction is sent to a non-existent account, it will have to pay additional state gas during execution.
This change stems from Glamsterdam’s gas repricing package, including EIP-2780 and EIP-8037, which shifts a portion of costs from a fixed calculation to depending on the state created by the transaction. For transactions creating a new account, the reference case in EIP-2780 is equivalent to 183,600 state gas. For the same ETH transfer with no calldata, the gas cost may therefore vary depending on whether the recipient already exists.
EIP-7702 Made the Edge Case More Visible
Glamsterdam is not the first time the 21,000-gas assumption has been challenged. Pectra, activated on the Ethereum mainnet on May 7, 2025, introduced EIP-7702 to the network, allowing EOAs to delegate to smart contract code in certain scenarios.
This change allows certain wallet addresses to behave more like smart accounts than traditional EOAs. Etherscan currently tracks EIP-7702 authorizations separately and has recorded over 1 million authorizations, indicating that this is no longer a purely theoretical detail.
Four ETH Transfers Failed at 21,000 Gas. Source: VEDa Investigations
In a case analyzed by VEDa Investigations back in June 2026, four consecutive ETH transfers failed at a 21,000 gas limit; the transaction only succeeded afterwards when the actual gas used reached 21,055. While this case serves merely as an illustrative example, it demonstrates why the 21,000-gas assumption had already begun to weaken even before Glamsterdam.
What Happens Next
Platåberget will serve as the testing ground for wallet and infrastructure teams to test Glamsterdam before the upgrade moves further along the testnet pipeline. The Ethereum Foundation stated that once feedback is integrated into client software and specifications, a non-finality devnet will be deployed this month, before subsequent testnet stages on Sepolia and Hoodi.
For everyday users, this change does not mean ETH transfers become riskier or that every transaction becomes more expensive. If wallets and RPC providers update correctly, most of the changes will be handled in the background. The risk lies primarily with legacy tools that still default to 21,000 gas for every transfer.
After Glamsterdam, wallets will need to look beyond whether a transaction carries calldata or not. The recipient address status, potential delegation, and whether the transaction creates a new state can all affect the gas required for an ETH transfer.
