Two rival Ethereum drafts aim to stop Glamsterdam's gas repricing from breaking deployed contracts

On Sunday, two Ethereum developers filed competing draft proposals to keep the Glamsterdam hard fork from breaking smart contracts that already run on the network, CoinDesk reported. The trouble comes from two parts of the upgrade, Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 8037 and EIP-8038. They raise the gas Ethereum charges for creating new state and for accessing existing state.

The Ethereum Foundation wrote in August that the goal is to make gas costs match the real resource cost of each operation. Its developers replayed historical mainnet transactions under the new schedule and found a small set of contracts that rely on assumptions the change breaks. These include the fixed 2,300-gas allowance that Solidity's transfer and send functions forward, gas values hardcoded into calls, logic that branches on the remaining-gas reading, and presigned transactions with fixed gas limits. The audit firm ChainSecurity flagged contracts that assume a reverted call cannot return gas already spent on creating state. CoinDesk cites its estimate that creating a new storage slot could cost 110,020 gas once a separate allowance runs out, compared with 22,100 gas under current rules. OpenZeppelin opened a review of gas invariants that tracks problems such as its default post-operation cost function under-billing after EIP-8038. Developers postponed a Glamsterdam testnet activation in October after security researchers raised these risks.

The two drafts solve the problem in opposite ways. EIP-8488, from a developer CoinDesk identifies as Glisic, splits the instruction set in two. Existing contracts stay on the legacy gas schedule, and new contracts must use "V2" instructions. The draft from developer Giulio Rebuffo applies the new prices to every transaction but lets old applications behave as they do today. CoinDesk describes the split as a choice about what contracts see versus what users pay. Both are drafts. Neither names a target date, and Glamsterdam has no confirmed mainnet activation date.

Each option has a cost. Versioned instructions keep old contract behavior exactly as it is, but every client must then maintain two gas schedules permanently. That conflicts with the Lean Ethereum program's goal of simplifying the protocol. Uniform pricing keeps a single cost model for users, but clients must show legacy contracts one gas figure while charging another, and that mismatch can itself cause consensus bugs. The findings so far show no contract under exploit. The code these changes affect underlies the $42.13 billion that DeFiLlama counts as locked in decentralized finance (DeFi) on Ethereum.