Ethereum's Glamsterdam Upgrade Is Under Fire as Developers Warn It Could Break the Chain

A growing crowd of Ethereum developers wants the brakes slammed on Glamsterdam, one of two major upgrades planned for 2026. Their warning is blunt: the upgrade's planned gas changes could break smart contracts that hold user funds, according to BeInCrypto. At the heart of the fight sits EIP-8037, which raises gas costs for creating new state — storage entries and new contracts.

That's a problem because plenty of contracts hardcode a fixed gas amount for those steps, or peek at how much gas is left mid-transaction. Crank the price up, and those calls can run dry and fail. Since deployed contracts are immutable, nobody can just patch them. Funds could end up stuck.

The pushback is loud and unusually personal. Curve Finance's founder put it simply: don't break the chain, warning Glamsterdam could trigger another emergency hard fork rollback, complete with drama. One well-known DeFi developer called the plan completely ridiculous, pointing to a list of 200,000 affected contracts in the ethereum/repricing-impact repo — and arguing methodological gaps mean the real damage goes wider, hitting high-profile protocols at both deployment and operation.

Another developer said his team spotted the same issues a security firm later flagged, and that was before Glamsterdam even hit the Sepolia testnet. Rushing it out while ignoring community feedback would be a mistake, he wrote. An Ethereum Foundation board member lined up on the same side, saying he won't push for a fork that breaks invariants nobody knew about until roughly two weeks ago.

This isn't Glamsterdam's first bruise. Back in October, core developers delayed a Glamsterdam test on the Hoodi testnet after security researchers raised red flags. Even supporters have flipped. One influential community voice initially pushed to activate asap, arguing Ethereum guarantees network access rather than specific gas prices — then reversed hours later, admitting he was wrong and that the issue is essentially worse than is generally understood. He also conceded the community collectively blew the design, the due diligence and the public communication, calling gas introspection a serious problem needing immediate sunlight.

Now core developers are under pressure to publish more data before Glamsterdam ever reaches mainnet. The mess lands at an awkward moment: Ethereum ETFs just logged their worst month for flows since launch. And there's a bigger shadow — Vitalik Buterin has already billed the next upgrade, Hegota, as Ethereum's last normal fork.