Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade will adjust gas pricing for state operations, and a small number of contracts with hardcoded gas assumptions may need to be fixed.

The Ethereum Foundation team has released an impact assessment of gas repricing for the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade. The upgrade includes two EIPs: EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The former increases and standardizes the cost of creating new states, including new accounts, new storage slots, and deployed bytecode. The latter raises the cost of state access operations (such as SSTORE, SLOAD, and cold account access), making gas prices more accurately reflect actual resource consumption. State operation gas pricing has not been adjusted since the Berlin fork in 2021, while Ethereum’s state size has grown significantly, and recent increases in the gas limit have further accelerated this growth. The new pricing is based on a performance target supporting approximately a 3x increase in base throughput, and serves as a necessary prerequisite for future further hikes in the gas limit. The team evaluated the actual impact by replaying historical mainnet transactions, categorizing all transactions into four groups: most transactions are completely unaffected; some transactions still succeed but have changes in details like gas usage; some contracts run out of gas under their original limit but can complete when the limit is raised; a tiny number of contracts may still fail even with a significantly increased gas limit. This last category typically relies on hardcoded gas assumptions. Developers can check if their contracts are affected and verify fixes on the Platåberget testnet. End users do not need to take any action, as updated wallets and infrastructure will handle the changes automatically.