Ethereum developers flag contracts at risk from gas changes

Ethereum developers issued a warning on August 24 that the upcoming gas‑price adjustments in the Glamsterdam upgrade may affect a limited set of Layer‑1 smart contracts, wallets and related tooling.

What the upgrade changes

The Glamsterdam upgrade will include two Ethereum Improvement Proposals:

• EIP‑8037 – raises the cost of creating new state, such as new accounts, storage slots and contract bytecode.
• EIP‑8038 – increases the cost of accessing existing state, covering operations like SLOAD, SSTORE, cold account access, EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY.

These changes aim to curb rapid state growth and prepare the network for higher throughput.

Contracts most at risk

Testing of historical main‑net transactions under the new pricing schedule identified four outcome groups. The most concerning group consists of contracts that continue to fail even after raising supplied gas limits. The recurring risk factors are:

• Hard‑coded 2,300‑gas stipends (e.g., transfer or send in Solidity).
• Fixed call‑limit values.
• Logic that relies on gasleft().
• Presigned transactions with static gas limits.

Most flagged failures can be resolved by increasing the transaction’s gas limit, but a small subset may require code changes.

Impact on wallets and infrastructure

Beyond smart contracts, wallets, RPC providers, indexers and other node tools must update their gas‑estimation algorithms. Tools that cache constant gas values could underestimate the required gas, causing transaction failures. Updated software should automatically apply the new estimates; end users do not need to intervene.

Testing and next steps

The Ethereum Foundation has launched the Platåberget testnet (also known as glam-devnet-8) with the new repricing schedule in place. Developers can use the network’s checker to identify affected transactions and test fixes by raising gas limits or adjusting contract logic.

Further testing will continue on public testnets (Sepolia and Hoodi) before a main‑net activation, targeted for Q4 2026, pending stable client implementations.