On August 17, the Ethereum Foundation announced Plat\u00e5berget, a <\/span>public testnet for the Glamsterdam upgrade<\/span><\/a>, where wallet, dApp, and Ethereum infrastructure development teams can test changes early before they are deployed to Sepolia, Hoodi, and eventually mainnet. Alongside the Plat\u00e5berget fork scheduled for August 20, the Foundation warned that tools relying on <\/span>hardcoded gas limits<\/b> may fail, including the common assumption around the <\/span>21,000 gas<\/b> limit for ETH transfers.<\/span><\/p>\n Plat\u00e5berget<\/b> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n The Glamsterdam fork on Plat\u00e5berget 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.<\/span><\/p>\n A key point emphasized by the Foundation is <\/span>gas repricing<\/b>, 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 Plat\u00e5berget.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201c<\/span>send max<\/span><\/i>\u201d or \u201c<\/span>empty wallet<\/span><\/i>\u201d to calculate the remaining ETH balance after fees.<\/span><\/p>\n In the Plat\u00e5berget 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.<\/span><\/p>\n This change stems from Glamsterdam\u2019s 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 <\/span>183,600 state gas<\/b>. For the same ETH transfer with no calldata, the gas cost may therefore vary depending on whether the recipient already exists.<\/span><\/p>\n Glamsterdam is not the first time the 21,000-gas assumption has been challenged. <\/span>Pectra<\/span><\/a>, activated on the Ethereum mainnet on May 7, 2025, introduced <\/span>EIP-7702<\/b> to the network, allowing EOAs to delegate to smart contract code in certain scenarios.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\nGlamsterdam Enters Public Testing With a Warning for Wallets<\/b><\/h2>\n
Why the 21,000-Gas Assumption Is No Longer Universal<\/b><\/h2>\n
EIP-7702 Made the Edge Case More Visible<\/b><\/h2>\n
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