Rival EIPs Aim to Stop Glamsterdam Breaking Ethereum's Old Contracts

Two Ethereum developers filed rival proposals on Sunday to stop the network's next upgrade from breaking live applications, after researchers identified roughly 200,000 contracts exposed to new gas pricing.

The core issue sits inside Glamsterdam, Ethereum's next major software upgrade. Two of its included proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, raise the gas Ethereum charges for creating and interacting with stored data. Gas is the meter that prices every step a smart contract takes. Under EIP-8037, the base charge for creating a contract jumps from 32,000 gas to 183,600, before code storage and execution costs are added.

Many Ethereum apps were built on the assumption those costs would never change. Some pay a fixed gas amount each time they call another contract; if that call gets more expensive, it fails. Many of these apps can't be updated once deployed.

What do the two fixes propose?

Leo Glisic's draft, EIP-8488, splits Ethereum's instruction set in two. "Existing contracts keep the legacy schedule," the draft states, while "new contracts must use V2 opcodes that carry the EIP-8037/8038 gas schedule." Old apps pay today's prices; only apps launched after the upgrade face the new rates.

Giulio Rebuffo's draft takes a different route: charge everyone the new prices, but let old apps keep running as if nothing changed. His design runs two gas meters per transaction, one tracking execution under the old rules and one where "billing uses the new schedule and determines the transaction fee." The draft concedes "no execution-client implementation or consensus tests have been run for this design."

Why was the testnet rehearsal delayed?

The repricing risk has already slowed the upgrade's rollout. Glamsterdam runs on one of Ethereum's practice networks, where developers test changes before they reach mainnet. A second rehearsal scheduled for Oct. 26 was postponed after security researchers raised the alarm.

"imho Glamsterdam should not be shipped in its current form, period," security researcher pcaversaccio wrote on X, referring to the gas increases. He said he had flagged the issue to Ethereum's core developers two weeks earlier.

Pseudonymous developer banteg went further. "Besides the already huge list of 200,000 affected contracts in ethereum/repricing-impact, i found multiple methodological issues that make it miss many more," he wrote on X. "It affects deployment and operation of several high profile protocols, not just some random devs misusing opcodes that were given to them."

What happens next?

Both drafts are early-stage proposals with no implementation work yet demonstrated, and Rebuffo's explicitly lacks client code and consensus tests. Core developers must now weigh two structurally different paths — a versioned opcode split versus dual gas metering — against a timeline already slipping. The postponed Oct. 26 testnet rehearsal leaves the upgrade's schedule dependent on whether either fix, or a revised repricing, can win developer consensus before Glamsterdam ships.