The upcoming Glamsterdam Ethereum upgrade introduces EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, which reprice the cost of creating and accessing state (new accounts, storage slots, SSTORE, SLOAD, cold account access, EXTCODESIZE/EXTCODECOPY) to better reflect real resource costs, enabling future gas limit increases. Replaying historical mainnet transactions shows most contracts are unaffected, some need only a gas-limit bump, and a small subset relying on hardcoded gas assumptions (fixed stipends, gasleft() branching, presigned transactions) could break. Developers can check an affected-contracts search tool, test on the Platåberget testnet (glam-devnet-8), and wallet/RPC/node tooling teams must update gas estimation logic before mainnet activation.
Questions this post answers
What do EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 change about Ethereum gas costs in the Glamsterdam upgrade?
EIP-8037 increases and separately meters the cost of creating new state such as accounts, storage slots, and deployed bytecode, while EIP-8038 increases the cost of accessing state through SSTORE, SLOAD, cold account access, and EXTCODESIZE/EXTCODECOPY. Both are scheduled for inclusion in the Glamsterdam upgrade and reflect real measured costs on current state size, last adjusted in the Berlin fork in 2021, enabling roughly a 3x future throughput increase. Track protocol upgrades like Glamsterdam's gas repricing on daily.dev before they hit mainnet.
Which smart contracts are likely to break due to Ethereum's Glamsterdam gas repricing?
Contracts that fail even with a substantially raised gas limit typically rely on hardcoded gas assumptions, such as Solidity's transfer/send fixed 2,300 gas stipend, hardcoded gas values passed in calls, logic branching on gasleft(), or presigned transactions with fixed gas limits. Most flagged contracts are instead fixable simply by raising the gas limit, and the majority of contracts see no change at all. Developers auditing contracts for gas-limit fragility can follow protocol changes like this on daily.dev.
How can I test whether my Ethereum contract is affected by the Glamsterdam gas repricing before mainnet?
Contract addresses can be checked against an affected-contracts search tool that shows distinct failure modes and which repricing EIP drives each one. The Platåberget testnet, identified as glam-devnet-8, already runs the new gas schedule and is available now for testing fixes ahead of the eventual rollout to public testnets and mainnet activation. Teams preparing for gas-schedule changes can keep tabs on rollout timelines via daily.dev.