Ethereum developers recently warned that two gas pricing adjustments planned for the Glamsterdam upgrade may cause compatibility issues with a small number of Ethereum mainnet contracts. The development team stated that most historical transactions were unaffected during replay testing, and some anomalies can be resolved by increasing the transaction gas limit.
Two proposals adjust the cost of status.
This alert primarily concerns EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The former increases the cost of creating on-chain state, including new accounts, storage slots, and contract bytecode; the latter raises the cost of accessing existing state, covering execution-layer operations such as SLOAD, SSTORE, and cold account access.
The Ethereum Foundation stated that this repricing is in preparation for future network capacity upgrades. As the Ethereum chain's state continues to grow and validators support higher block gas limits, operations with high resource consumption require repricing.
Fixed gas assumptions are most prone to issues.
Developers replayed historical Ethereum mainnet transactions according to Glamsterdam’s proposed pricing rules and categorized the results into four groups: completely unchanged, gas usage changed but still successful, repairable by increasing the gas limit, and likely to fail even with significantly increased gas.
- Use a transfer or send with a 2,300 gas stipend
- The contract hardcodes the call gas limit.
- Relying on gasleft() for logical decisions
The Ethereum Foundation specifically noted that contracts using the Solidity historical 2,300 gas subsidy mechanism require careful review, as operations that previously fit within this limit may now consume more gas under the new state access pricing.
The wallet and gas tools also need to be updated.
This adjustment affects more than just smart contracts. Wallets, RPC providers, indexers, and node tools also need to update their gas estimation systems. If software continues to use old constants or cached parameters, it may underestimate the gas required for transactions, leading to execution failures.
One typical change is that some tools default to assuming that standard transfers always require only 21,000 gas. Developers note that this assumption does not always hold: while transfers to existing accounts still maintain this level, transfers that create new accounts incur additional state costs.
The testnet is now open for inspection.
To support upgrade testing, Ethereum developers have launched the Platåberget testnet, also known as glam-devnet-8, which is now running the new fee schedule. Contract maintainers can use the official verification tool to input addresses and check whether historical transactions show any discrepancies under the new rules.
Next, Ethereum will continue with devnet testing and advance fork testing on Sepolia and Holesky. According to the current roadmap, the target launch date for Glamsterdam is the fourth quarter of 2026, but the mainnet activation date has not yet been finalized.