Ethereum developers issued a formal alert this week regarding upcoming changes to gas pricing that will take effect with the Glamsterdam upgrade. The network improvement, currently targeted for the final quarter of 2026, is designed to support a significant increase in Layer 1 throughput. Developers have identified a post-upgrade gas limit near 200 million as a practical target, compared with the present level of about 60 million. The changes aim to deliver roughly three times current base throughput while keeping validator hardware requirements manageable.

The warning centers on two Ethereum Improvement Proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. EIP-8037 adjusts the cost of creating new state, covering new accounts, storage slots and contract bytecode. EIP-8038 raises the price of accessing existing state through operations such as SLOAD, SSTORE, cold account access, EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY. These updates mark the first broad revision of state-operation pricing since the Berlin upgrade in 2021. Since then the Ethereum state has expanded considerably, and validators have already absorbed successive increases in the block gas limit.

Limited Compatibility Risks Identified

Replay testing of historical mainnet transactions under the proposed pricing schedule showed that the large majority of contracts continue to function without modification. A small subset, however, may fail or experience degraded performance if they contain fixed gas assumptions that no longer hold. Contracts that rely on the historical 2,300-gas stipend used by Solidity’s transfer and send functions, hardcoded call gas limits, logic based on gasleft(),or presigned transactions with rigid gas ceilings face the highest risk.

In many of the flagged cases the simplest remedy is to raise the supplied gas limit. The Ethereum Foundation has already begun direct outreach to maintainers of the most affected contracts and describes the potentially broken group as limited in size. Developers can test contracts immediately on the Platåberget testnet, also known as glam-devnet-8, which already implements the new schedule. A public checker tool allows any address to be screened for historical transactions that diverge under the revised rules.

The same pricing changes require updates from wallets, RPC providers, indexers and gas-estimation tools. Software that relies on cached constants or assumes every simple transfer costs exactly 21,000 gas may under-estimate requirements, particularly for transactions that create new accounts. Ordinary users are not expected to take manual action once infrastructure providers deploy the necessary updates.

Broader Scaling Architecture

Gas repricing forms only one part of Glamsterdam’s design. The upgrade also incorporates Block-Level Access Lists, which give clients advance notice of the accounts and storage locations a block will touch, enabling greater parallelization of disk reads and state calculations. Enshrined proposer-builder separation reorganizes block construction and validation. Together these features are intended to allow higher gas limits without a proportional rise in the computational burden placed on validators.

State-growth controls under EIP-8037 target annual state expansion of roughly 120 GiB even at elevated gas limits, helping keep full-node operation within reach of non-professional hardware. Longer-term work on zkEVM verification could eventually let validators check cryptographic proofs rather than re-execute every transaction, further reducing the cost of higher throughput.

Ethereum has already doubled its gas limit from approximately 30 million in early 2025 to the current 60 million. Glamsterdam continues that trajectory while attempting to preserve decentralization. Industry participants note that decentralized exchanges, which require fast execution, deep liquidity and low per-transaction costs, stand to benefit if Layer 1 performance improves materially.

A stronger base layer may also prompt some applications that currently operate on rollups or dedicated chains to reconsider deployment location. Direct Layer 1 deployment offers simpler access to Ethereum’s liquidity and composability. At the same time, rollups continue to provide specialized execution environments, lower latency and greater control over fees and governance. Ethereum’s broader roadmap continues to expand data availability for Layer 2 networks through mechanisms such as PeerDAS and additional blob capacity, so the two approaches are expected to advance in parallel.

Timeline and Next Steps

No firm mainnet activation date has been set. The schedule depends on stable client implementations and successful public-testnet deployments. After further work on the Platåberget environment, developers plan to fork the Sepolia and Hoodi testnets. Glamsterdam takes its name from a combination of the earlier Amsterdam execution-layer upgrade and the Gloas consensus-layer effort, signaling its dual focus on both layers of the protocol.

Ethereum continues to host the largest active developer community in the sector, with roughly 7,600 monthly active developers compared with about 2,300 on competing networks. The competitive environment has intensified, however, as other chains offer high throughput and low fees. Raising Layer 1 capacity is viewed as a way to pair Ethereum’s established security, liquidity and tooling with execution characteristics that better match the demands of modern applications.

Contract maintainers are advised to review their codebases and test against the new gas schedule well ahead of the projected fourth-quarter 2026 window. Infrastructure providers face a parallel requirement to update estimation logic so that ordinary users experience no disruption when the upgrade activates.