Ethereum developers are urged to review gas assumptions before the Glamsterdam upgrade, as state costs now match actual conditions.
The Ethereum network is preparing for the Glamsterdam upgrade—an update to the protocol that will recalibrate gas fees for state-related operations through two planned proposals: EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. These changes aim to align gas pricing with the actual computation and storage resources consumed by transactions, addressing the increasingly widening discrepancy since the last adjustment during the Berlin fork in 2021.
EIP-8037 seeks to lower the cost of creating new state by increasing and standardizing the fees for creating new accounts, storage slots, and deployed bytecode, and measuring these individually. This separation is intended to ensure that, even as the block gas limit continues to rise, state growth remains sustainable.
Meanwhile, EIP-8038 increases the costs for accessing existing state—including SSTORE, SLOAD, cold account access, and actions such as EXTCODESIZE or EXTCODECOPY—to reflect current performance metrics for the network as the size of extended state grows. The organization noted that the repricing plan is designed to support roughly a threefold increase in baseline throughput, making it a prerequisite for node operators to scale further without compromising performance.
Assessing Impact and Recommendations for Developers
Analysis of historical mainnet transactions replayed under the new scheduling scheme shows that the vast majority of smart contracts will execute exactly the same, with only a small portion of transactions exhibiting behavioral changes. Transactions fall into four categories: unchanged transactions; transactions that succeed after adjusting gas usage; transactions that exhaust the original gas limit but complete when the limit is increased; and transactions that still fail even with significantly higher limits.
The last category of contracts often rely on fragile assumptions about gas costs, such as hard-coded allowances (like the fixed 2,300 gas in Solidity’s transfer and send functions), explicit gas values in external calls, conditional logic based on gasleft(), or pre-signed transactions with inflexible constraints. The Ethereum Foundation has directly contacted the largest affected developer teams and compiled a report on the most impacted entities.
Developers and infrastructure operators are advised to verify contract status using official query tools and test on the Platåberget testnet, which is currently running the new scheduling scheme. Contracts that can be fixed by raising the gas limit require frontend or infrastructure updates, while those at risk of failing need manual review of flagged call sites.
Wallet providers, RPC services, and node tools must update their gas estimation logic, as the new rules will cause cached constants to underestimate gas. Regular end users need not take any action; updated wallets and services are expected to handle the transition automatically. The repricing is already active on development networks and will be rolled out to public testnets before going live on the mainnet.

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