Ethereum developers warned on Aug. 24 that gas repricing in the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade could break a small group of Layer 1 smart contracts. The changes raise costs for creating and accessing state, and the Ethereum Foundation is urging contract maintainers, wallets and gas estimators to test and update before mainnet activation.
Ethereum developers warned on Aug. 24 that planned gas changes in the Glamsterdam upgrade could disrupt a small group of Layer 1 smart contracts. The Ethereum Foundation urged developers to test their contracts and update fixed gas assumptions before the changes go live on mainnet.
Two proposals reprice state costs
The warning concerns EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, both scheduled for inclusion in Glamsterdam. EIP-8037 changes how Ethereum charges for creating state, including new accounts, storage slots and deployed contract bytecode, introducing separate state-gas accounting meant to prevent rapid blockchain-state growth as the network increases capacity. EIP-8038 raises costs for accessing existing state, covering operations including SLOAD, SSTORE, cold account access, EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY.
Developers last broadly adjusted state-operation prices during the Berlin upgrade in 2021. Since then, Ethereum's state has expanded and validators have supported higher block gas limits. The Foundation said repricing resource-heavy operations is necessary before the network can safely raise capacity further. Developers designed the new schedule around a performance target that could support roughly three times the current base throughput.
Fixed gas assumptions pose the biggest risk
Developers replayed historical mainnet transactions under Glamsterdam's proposed pricing schedule and sorted the results into unchanged transactions, successful transactions with different gas usage, failures fixable through higher limits, and potentially broken transactions. The last group continued to fail even after researchers raised the supplied gas substantially.
The Foundation's warning identified fixed gas stipends, hardcoded call limits, logic based on gasleft() and presigned transactions with fixed limits as recurring risk factors. Contracts using Solidity's historical 2,300-gas stipend through transfer or send may need particular attention, since operations that previously completed within that allowance may consume more gas under the new schedule. The Foundation has not publicly identified every affected application, but said outreach to the most affected builders was already underway and described the potentially broken group as small.
Wallets and gas estimators must adapt too
The warning extends beyond smart contracts. Wallets, RPC providers, indexers and node tools must update their gas-estimation systems to recognize the revised cost rules, since software using cached constants could underestimate the gas a transaction needs and cause it to fail. Both proposals require tools using eth_estimateGas and related functions to account for the revised state costs. Regular users do not need to make manual changes, according to the Foundation, since updated wallet and infrastructure providers should apply the necessary gas estimates automatically.
Testing moves to the Platåberget network
Developers launched the Platåberget testnet, also called glam-devnet-8, as a long-running environment that already runs the new repricing schedule. Contract maintainers can enter an address into Ethereum's checker to identify historical transactions that diverge under the proposed rules, then raise gas limits when that fixes the issue or review individual call sites when failures persist.
The next stage involves additional devnet testing, followed by forks on Sepolia and Hoodi. Ethereum's roadmap targets Glamsterdam for Q4 2026, but developers have not announced a fixed mainnet activation date.
Source: crypto.news
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