Two Ethereum Proposals Address Gas Risks for Existing Contracts in Glamsterdam Upgrade
Key Facts
Developers have submitted two competing proposals to address the risk that existing smart contracts could be affected by gas pricing changes in the Glamsterdam upgrade, according to a CoinDesk report published on 9 November 2026. The report said the proposals were submitted on Sunday in an effort to prevent some contracts from breaking as the network moves to a new fee schedule. The discussion follows a delay to upgrade testing on Hoodi to allow further investigation into how the changes interact with deployed contracts. The trade-off centers on preserving the behavior of legacy contracts while applying the new fee rules. No freeze of user funds or actual exploit of a major production protocol has been confirmed.
Leo Glisic proposes retaining the old gas schedule for existing contracts while requiring new contracts to use V2 instructions, according to the proposal draft published on GitHub. These instructions are tied to the gas schedules defined in EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The design aims to avoid changing execution costs relied on by contracts already deployed, while new contracts begin operating under the proposed rules. Giulio Rebuffo, by contrast, proposes running two gas counters for each transaction: one tracking execution under the old rules and the other calculating fees under the new schedule. His draft says fee calculation will use the new schedule, but also notes that client implementation and consensus testing have not yet been completed.
The dispute matters because of the scale of the repricing: EIP-8037 raises the base fee for contract creation from 32,000 to 183,600 gas units, before the cost of code storage and execution is added. The Ethereum Foundation says the proposal raises and unifies the cost of creating new state, including accounts, storage slots and deployed code, and separates the measurement of that cost. EIP-8038 raises the cost of accessing state, including read and write operations and cold access to accounts. The upgrade thus resets the cost of creating and accessing data on the network. The foundation says state operation prices have not changed since the Berlin fork in 2021, and that repricing them is a prerequisite for raising the gas limit in the future.
Replaying historical transactions on mainnet identified a small set of contracts that rely on assumptions the gas schedule could change, according to the Ethereum Foundation. Those contracts could break or perform worse if not updated, while the foundation said the vast majority are unaffected and most identified issues can be fixed by raising the gas limit. The assumptions at risk include a fixed allowance of 2,300 gas for Solidity's transfer and send operations, fixed gas values in calls, and logic that relies on gasleft(). In its report on the delay, ChainSecurity had pointed to the possibility that some contracts could handle a called contract's failure or the amount of gas remaining differently. In the example cited in the report, creating a new storage slot when a separate allowance is exhausted could cost 110,020 gas, compared with 22,100 under the old rules.
The repricing affects application developers, wallets and network connectivity tools. The Ethereum Foundation is urging application developers to test contracts and estimate gas under the new rules, while wallets, RPC infrastructure and contract tools also need to update their estimation mechanisms. The foundation warned that stored gas constants could lead to underestimates and, in turn, failed transactions. The new prices are intended, according to the foundation, to reflect the actual cost of state operations and support an increase of nearly three times in baseline throughput. Achieving that goal remains contingent on addressing the changes' effects on existing contracts and the tools used to operate them.
The Ethereum Foundation announced on 22 October that it was delaying Glamsterdam's activation on Hoodi, which had been scheduled for 26 October, without setting a replacement date. It was to be the next public test after the upgrade was activated on Sepolia on 6 October; the schedule to raise Hoodi's gas limit to 200 million was also canceled. The roadmap says the upgrade remains in the testing phase on development networks, with a mainnet window expected in the fourth quarter of 2026 and no confirmed date. The foundation had said Glamsterdam combines gas pricing changes with a proposal to separate block proposers from block builders within the protocol, as well as block-level access lists. The changes aim to expand Layer 1 capacity while keeping block validation practical for operators.