Ethereum's next major network upgrade, Glamsterdam, may force wallets and transaction infrastructure to reconsider one of the blockchain's longest-standing assumptions: the flat 21,000-gas base cost of a transaction. That constant was written into the protocol at Ethereum's 2015 launch and has survived every hard fork since, which is why so much downstream tooling still treats it as fixed.

The shift would arrive through EIP-2780, a proposal to replace the fixed 21,000-gas charge with separate costs tied to the resources a transaction actually consumes. The proposal remains under consideration for Glamsterdam, which Ethereum currently targets for the second half of 2026 and which follows the Fusaka upgrade that went live in December 2025. Like recent upgrades, Glamsterdam takes its name from a pair of cities — in this case Glasgow and Amsterdam.

Why the 21,000-Gas Constant Is Changing

Under current rules, a standard ETH transfer between existing accounts requires 21,000 gas. Wallets, gas estimators and transaction builders have anchored their logic to that figure for years.

EIP-2780 would decompose the constant into several components. A simple zero-value transaction could require just 15,000 gas, while a self-transfer could fall to 12,000. An ordinary ETH transfer to an existing account, however, would still total 21,000 gas under the current version of the proposal.

The larger change applies when a transaction creates a new account. Today, a plain transfer that creates a new account already costs an additional 25,000 gas on top of the 21,000 base. Under the proposal, such transfers would instead incur a separate state-gas charge, because Ethereum must permanently store the new account. The current specification assigns approximately 183,600 state gas to that operation.

The state-gas component also connects EIP-2780 to one of Ethereum's longest-running engineering debates: state growth. Every account added to the chain expands the dataset that full nodes must store and serve indefinitely, and researchers have spent years studying remedies such as statelessness and state expiry. Charging explicitly for the storage a transaction forces on the network gives that concern a concrete pricing mechanism.

New Gas-Estimation Challenges for Wallets

The proposal matters because wallets would no longer be able to treat 21,000 as a universal minimum for transaction validity. EIP-2780 separates intrinsic gas, which determines whether a transaction can enter a block, from runtime charges that depend on the state touched during execution. That distinction could require updates across wallets, RPC providers, gas estimators and account-abstraction infrastructure.

The impact also extends to ERC-4337 bundlers. Under Ethereum's state-gas model, applications that rely on gasleft to measure sub-operation costs may no longer capture every charge accurately.

Glamsterdam is pursuing broader changes as well, including Block-Level Access Lists and higher block gas limits. Together, those changes aim to make Ethereum more capable of processing transactions in parallel while keeping network resources sustainable. The upgrade's final scope will be settled through Ethereum's All Core Devs calls, where client teams decide which proposals are included and then exercise them on public devnets before mainnet activation.

For everyday users, the transition should remain largely invisible if wallet software receives the necessary updates. For developers, however, the familiar 21,000-gas rule is becoming a less reliable assumption as Ethereum moves toward a more granular pricing model.