Glamsterdam's New Gas Rules Could Trip Up 200,000 Ethereum Contracts

Ethereum developer banteg has flagged roughly 200,000 smart contracts that could be caught up in the network's coming Glamsterdam upgrade, according to Cointribune. The figure comes from a tool that models how the new gas pricing rules would ripple through existing code — and banteg reckons the method might miss other vulnerable contracts entirely. It does not mean all 200,000 will actually break.

The trouble sits in two proposals bundled into Glamsterdam: EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The first reworks what it costs to create permanent data on Ethereum, lifting the base cost of deploying a smart contract by 151,600 gas units, now at 183,600 before any code or execution fees. The second bumps up fees tied to reading and modifying that data.

Older contracts were written with fixed gas limits, handing a precise allowance to any contract they call. If that allowance runs short after Glamsterdam, the call can fail. Immutable contracts — code that cannot be edited after deployment — are especially exposed, and some DeFi protocols could hit trouble on transactions, with funds temporarily locked in certain scenarios. No mass breakdown of that kind has shown up on mainnet yet.

On November 8, Leo Glisic and Giulio Rebuffo pitched rival fixes. Glisic's EIP-8488 would keep already-deployed contracts on today's rules while new ones adopt the updated gas costs, splitting the instruction set in two. Rebuffo wants a pair of gas counters per transaction — one tracking execution under the old rules, one calculating what users actually pay at the new rates — a method he concedes needs heavier changes to Ethereum's software.

Neither is locked in. Rebuffo says no execution clients have implemented his approach and no consensus test has run, and both remain drafts with no decision on folding either into Glamsterdam. The Ethereum Foundation made the pause official on November 6, holding off Hoodi deployment until the gas-rule risks are sorted, with ChainSecurity and Dedaub helping run the checks. The Foundation also published eight technical assumptions that some contracts lean on and that Glamsterdam could invalidate, asking developers and auditors to review their apps.

The road here has been bumpy. Glamsterdam went live on the Sepolia test network on October 6, and a test was already pushed back on October 26 after risks surfaced on 13 contracts. The next private test was penciled in for November 16 to 20 at the earliest — a timeline set before the new proposals landed — and no definitive date has been announced. Glamsterdam still aims to grow Ethereum's capacity while keeping its database in check, easing parallel transaction processing and tightening block production. A separate push would raise the per-block gas limit by 140 million, to 200 million, while work on the next upgrade, Hegotá, rolls on in parallel.