Ethereum Says Glamsterdam Gas Repricing Could Disrupt Some L1 Smart Contracts

What Glamsterdam changes

The repricing comes through EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, which are designed to bring gas costs closer to the real work involved in creating and accessing Ethereum state. EIP-8037 raises and harmonizes the cost of creating new state, including new accounts, new storage slots, and deployed bytecode, while metering that activity separately. EIP-8038 raises the cost of state access operations such as SSTORE, SLOAD, cold account access, and EXTCODESIZE or EXTCODECOPY.

Ethereum said gas prices for these state operations were last revised in the Berlin fork in 2021. Since then, network state has grown substantially, and recent gas-limit increases have accelerated that growth. The blog says repricing is needed before the gas limit can be pushed higher again, and that the new schedule is based on a performance target intended to support roughly a threefold increase in base throughput.

How the impact was measured

To estimate real-world effects, Ethereum replayed historical mainnet transactions under the new pricing rules and checked for divergences. The outcomes were grouped into four categories: no change, successful execution with changes, transactions that become valid again with a higher gas limit, and transactions that still fail even after a substantial gas-limit increase.

The foundation said the large majority of transactions fall into the first group, meaning their outcome and execution remain identical. The contracts in the most serious category tend to share patterns such as fixed gas stipends, hardcoded gas values in calls, logic that changes behavior based on gasleft(), or presigned transactions that cannot adapt because they use fixed gas limits.

Who may need to act

Ethereum said teams maintaining L1 contracts should check whether their contracts appear in the affected-contracts search tool published alongside the announcement. For contracts that only fail because the original gas limit is too low, the suggested remedy is to raise the gas supplied by frontends, infrastructure, or users.

For contracts that remain potentially broken even with more gas, developers are being told to inspect the flagged call sites and test fixes. The blog also advises reviewing any code that hardcodes gas values or branches on remaining gas even if a contract is not currently listed as affected.

The warning extends beyond contract teams. Wallets, RPC providers, and node tooling operators are being told to update gas estimation logic because eth_estimateGas and related handling must reflect the new cost rules. Ethereum said cached gas constants could underestimate transaction costs and cause failures if they are not updated.

Testing and next steps

Ethereum said the new repricing schedule is already live on the Platåberget testnet, also referred to as glam-devnet-8, where teams can test changes now. A report identifying the most-affected entities has been compiled, and direct outreach to those teams is already underway.

The foundation said no action is needed from regular users, provided wallets and infrastructure are updated appropriately. It also said the repricing will move from devnets to public testnets before any mainnet activation, with further communication planned through official blog posts and community channels as the rollout progresses.