The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade is facing strong backlash as two opposing proposals seek to protect 200,000 smart contracts from new gas fee regulations. The Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade is encountering opposition as two conflicting proposals were submitted on Sunday, November 8, to prevent the upgrade from breaking currently active smart contracts. An increasing number of Ethereum developers and investors are urging caution regarding the network’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam. Two developers submitted opposing proposals to stop the upgrade from damaging existing smart contracts. Concerns center on new gas fee rules. Security researchers estimate that approximately 200,000 existing contracts could be affected, including some holding user funds and incapable of being updated. Calls for a Pause Michael Egorov, founder of Curve Finance, posted a direct appeal on X. He wrote: “Please don’t break the chain,” warning that Glamsterdam in its current form risks triggering “another emergency chain split with massive complications.” Ethereum investor Ryan Berckmans reversed his stance after assessing the risks. Initially advocating for rapid deployment, he argued that Ethereum cannot guarantee fixed gas costs for all applications. “We (clearly now) should not continue pushing to activate Glam as soon as possible. I was wrong to say that,” Berckmans wrote on X. Security researcher pcaversaccio went further: “In my personal opinion, Glamsterdam should not be released in its current form, period,” he wrote, adding that the gas fee increase had been reported to core developers approximately two weeks prior. Anonymous developer banteg noted that a public analysis identified around 200,000 affected contracts. This developer warned that flaws in the methodology could lead to further undercounting, and that several critical protocols have already been exposed. Gas Fee Changes and Two Proposed Solutions The issue stems from two proposals within Glamsterdam: EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. These increase the gas fees Ethereum charges for creating and accessing data stored on the blockchain. Gas is the fee used to price each step a smart contract executes. Under EIP-8037, the base cost to create a contract would rise from 32,000 gas to 183,600 gas, not including storage or code execution costs. Many applications were built under the assumption that these costs would remain unchanged. Some applications allocate a fixed amount of gas when calling another contract; thus, an increase could cause those calls to fail. Security firm ChainSecurity identified eight such assumptions likely to be broken. Leo Glisic’s proposal, EIP-8488, would split Ethereum’s script into two versions. Existing contracts would retain the old gas pricing schedule, while new contracts would be required to use “V2” code with the new pricing. Giulio Rebuffo’s draft takes a different approach by using two separate gas meters per transaction. One meter tracks execution under old rules so contracts see what they expect; the other sets the actual fee based on the new pricing. Rebuffo’s draft explicitly states that no client implementation or consensus testing has yet been conducted for this design. Neither proposal has been approved for Glamsterdam, and neither specifies a target date. Developers delayed activating Glamsterdam on the Holesky testnet on October 26 after receiving security warnings. This delay included changes to the Amsterdam execution layer, the Gloas consensus mechanism, and plans to raise Holesky’s gas limit to 200 million. On November 6, Ethereum Foundation developer Marius van der Wijden said the organization is collaborating with ChainSecurity and Dedaub to review affected applications. The team is also gathering feedback from developers. At a meeting on October 29, developers preliminarily discussed testing Glamsterdam individually between November 16–20 at the earliest. This timeline was set before any new proposals were submitted. By Maisie Morrison