A gas change with real consequences
Ethereum’s next upgrade, Glamsterdam, is meant to move the network forward. But two proposals inside it, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, would raise the gas fees for creating and touching stored data. Gas is how Ethereum prices every step a smart contract takes. Under EIP-8037, the base charge for creating a contract rises from 32,000 gas to 183,600, before code storage and execution costs are added.
That matters because many live apps were built around today’s numbers. Some send a fixed amount of gas when they call another contract. If the call suddenly costs more, the transaction fails. A good number of those apps cannot be updated after deployment. So the upgrade could put existing user funds and operations at risk, not just future developers.
Test plans already slipped
The concern has already affected testing. Glamsterdam is running on practice networks, where changes are tried before real money is involved. A second rehearsal set for Oct. 26 was postponed after security researchers raised alarms. One researcher, pcaversaccio, said the upgrade should not ship in its current form and noted he had flagged the gas increases to core developers two weeks earlier. Another developer, banteg, said the affected-contract list already had 200,000 entries and that methodological issues likely made it miss more. He argued the change affects deployment and operation at several high-profile protocols, not only random developers misusing opcodes.
Two different ways to protect old contracts
On Sunday, two developers filed rival drafts. Leo Glisic’s EIP-8488 would split Ethereum’s instruction set in two. Existing contracts would keep the legacy gas schedule. New contracts would have to use V2 opcodes that carry the EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 schedule. In simple terms, old apps stay on old prices and new apps start on the new ones.
Giulio Rebuffo’s draft takes another route. It would run two gas meters per transaction. One tracks execution under the old rules, while the other uses the new schedule for billing and sets the transaction fee. The draft also admits that no execution-client implementation or consensus tests have been run for the design.
Neither plan is final. The choice now is whether Ethereum can change its cost model without forcing live contracts to fail. That is a hard problem, and the answer may not please everyone.
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