Ethereum's proposed Glamsterdam upgrade could triple network throughput but sharply raises gas costs for account and storage creation, putting millions of existing smart contracts and infrastructure at risk if not updated in time
Ethereum's next major protocol upgrade, known as Glamsterdam, aims to significantly increase the network's base-layer throughput. The proposed changes, still under review, would sharply raise gas costs for creating new accounts, storage slots, and deploying contract code. While the Ethereum Foundation says these adjustments could support up to three times more transaction capacity, the repricing exposes brittle gas assumptions in many existing smart contracts and infrastructure tools-potentially breaking millions of contracts if not addressed before mainnet deployment.
Throughput Gains, Higher State Costs
The Glamsterdam proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, target Ethereum's persistent state growth by aligning gas charges more closely with the actual network resources consumed by each operation. Under the candidate schedule, creating a new account would jump from 25,000 to 183,600 gas, while deploying a typical 24 KiB contract plus a new account would soar from under 5 million to nearly 38 million gas. The goal is to slow the rapid expansion of Ethereum's state database, which reached about 390 GiB in January 2026, and to prevent annual growth from exceeding performance thresholds that could degrade node operation.
Millions of Contracts at Risk
To assess the impact, researchers replayed nearly 930 million historical Ethereum transactions under the new gas schedule. The results show that while many transactions would succeed if users or infrastructure providers simply raised their gas limits, millions would still fail due to hardcoded gas assumptions or logic that cannot adapt to the new costs. The most vulnerable contracts include those with fixed 2,300-gas stipends, hardcoded internal call limits, or presigned transactions with static gas values. Immutable contracts-those that cannot be upgraded-face the highest operational risk, as they may require costly migrations or new implementations to remain functional.
Who Needs to Update?
Wallets, RPC providers, indexers, node tooling, and gas estimators must all update to reflect the new gas rules. Frontends and bundlers can no longer rely on cached constants or limits calibrated to the old schedule. The Ethereum Foundation warns that any tool built around a single gas dimension or hardcoded maximum will likely break. Even a simple ETH transfer to a new account will require more gas, so software assuming the old 21,000-gas constant for all transfers must be revised. Regular users may not notice changes if their wallets and infrastructure update in time, but developers and infrastructure providers face an immediate need to resimulate transactions, review fixed stipends, and test affected code paths against the candidate schedule.
Testing Window and Timeline
The Glamsterdam fork is currently live on devnets and is scheduled to move to the Sepolia and Hoodi public testnets before mainnet activation, which is tentatively planned for the fourth quarter of 2026. The proposals remain under formal review, giving builders a limited window to test, revise, or migrate affected contracts and tools. According to EgonCoin, a similar urgency was seen in previous Ethereum upgrades, such as the push to close the zkEVM security gap by December 2026, which also required broad developer coordination and infrastructure updates. The final deployment timeline will depend on the results of ongoing testing and community feedback.
According to data from the Ethereum Foundation, the state portion of a Geth node's database grew from about 390 GiB in January 2026, with daily new state creation rising from 105 MiB to 326 MiB after the gas limit was doubled from 30 million to 60 million. The proposed Glamsterdam parameters are designed to cap average annual state growth at 120 GiB under a 150 million gas block limit, with a worst-case scenario of 160 GiB per year if the block limit reaches 200 million. These figures are based on observed non-linear growth patterns and are intended to keep node operation feasible as throughput increases.
Ethereum's approach to scaling through gas repricing highlights the trade-offs between network capacity and long-term sustainability. By making state creation more expensive, the protocol aims to prevent uncontrolled state growth that could threaten node decentralization and performance. However, the shift also exposes the risks of hardcoded gas assumptions in smart contracts and infrastructure. Developers and infrastructure providers must now carefully review and update their systems to ensure compatibility with the new schedule, especially for immutable contracts that cannot be upgraded. The experience underscores the importance of designing smart contracts and tools with future protocol changes in mind, as Ethereum continues to evolve its base layer to meet growing demand.
