The Ethereum network is preparing for the Glamsterdam upgrade, a protocol update that will recalibrate gas fees for state-related operations through two scheduled proposals: EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The changes are intended to align gas pricing with the actual computational and storage resources consumed by transactions, addressing a gap that has widened since the last adjustment in the Berlin fork in 2021.

According to the Ethereum Foundation, EIP-8037 targets the cost of creating new state, including new accounts, storage slots, and deployed bytecode, by increasing and harmonizing these fees while metering them separately. The goal is to keep state growth sustainable even as block gas limits continue to rise.

EIP-8038, meanwhile, raises the cost of accessing existing state, including operations such as SSTORE, SLOAD, cold account access, and EXTCODESIZE or EXTCODECOPY, to reflect current performance metrics on the network’s expanded state size. The organization said the repricing schedule is designed to support roughly a threefold increase in base throughput, making it a prerequisite for further scaling without reducing performance for node operators.

Assessing the Impact on Developers

Analysis of historical mainnet transactions replayed under the new schedule suggests that the vast majority of smart contracts will execute in the same way, while only a small subset will see changed behavior. Transactions fall into four categories: those with no change; those that succeed with modified gas usage; those that exhaust their original gas limit but complete when the limit is raised; and those that fail even with substantially higher limits.

Contracts in the final category usually depend on brittle assumptions about gas costs, including hardcoded stipends such as the 2,300 gas fixed in Solidity’s transfer and send functions, explicit gas values in external calls, conditional logic based on gasleft(), or presigned transactions with inflexible limits. Because gas handling is embedded in both application logic and infrastructure defaults, the upgrade is also a test of how much of the ecosystem still relies on constants that were set under older pricing rules. The Ethereum Foundation has already contacted the most affected development teams directly and compiled a report of the entities most impacted.

Developers and infrastructure operators are being advised to check contract status through the official search tool and to test on the Platåberget testnet, which is currently running the new schedule. Contracts that can be fixed by raising gas limits will require frontend or infrastructure updates, while potentially broken contracts will need manual review of flagged call sites.

Wallet providers, RPC services, and node tooling also need to update gas estimation logic, since cached constants will produce underestimates under the new rules. That makes the testing phase especially important for tools that automatically prepare transactions for users, since incorrect estimates can surface only when a contract interacts with newly repriced state access. Regular users do not need to take action, as updated wallets and services are expected to handle the transition automatically. The repricing is already live on development networks and will roll out to public testnets before mainnet activation.