Ethereum's planned throughput expansion includes significant changes to how the network charges for state creation, potentially affecting millions of existing smart contracts. The Ethereum Foundation's proposed Glamsterdam upgrade is designed to support roughly three times the current base throughput by aligning gas charges more closely with actual network resource consumption.
Two proposals—EIP-8037 and EIP-8038—form the core of the repricing strategy. EIP-8037 targets state creation costs, raising charges substantially: creating a new account would jump from 25,000 gas to 183,600 gas, while deploying code would increase from roughly 4.9 million gas to 37.7 million gas. EIP-8038 addresses costs for accessing and modifying existing state. Together, these changes aim to manage the persistent state that Ethereum nodes must store and serve.
Testing reveals potential compatibility issues. Researchers replayed 929.7 million transactions from December 2024 through June 2026 against both current and proposed schedules. Under EIP-8037, approximately 2.7 million transaction replays failed even when allowed 10 times their original gas limit. Under EIP-8038, about 3 million transactions were similarly affected. The dashboard classifies these as potentially broken transactions, though the actual number of distinct contracts at risk remains unclear since repeated activity from busy applications inflates the count.
The majority of failures—174 million under EIP-8037 and 84 million under EIP-8038—could be resolved by increasing gas limits, shifting the burden primarily to wallets, bundlers, and infrastructure providers. However, a harder class of failures stems from hardcoded assumptions: fixed gas stipends, forwarded gas amounts in internal calls, logic that branches on remaining gas, and presigned transactions with locked limits. Contracts cannot adapt to higher limits alone.
The repricing particularly affects ERC-4337 smart account infrastructure. A public outreach report identifies recurring failures in systems like Across, Socket, CoW Protocol, and various EntryPoint implementations. Some affected systems may require new contract deployments followed by user migration, while others could be repaired through routing or batching adjustments.
The upgrade presents a coordination challenge before deployment. Wallets, RPC providers, indexers, node tools, and gas estimators must incorporate the new cost structure. Software that relies on cached gas constants or assumes fixed limits needs revision. Even basic operations like transferring ETH to a new account would carry additional state-creation charges at runtime.
EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 remain in formal review status. Ethereum's roadmap targets the fourth quarter of 2026 for deployment, with fixed testnet and mainnet dates still unannounced, leaving a testing window before parameters harden.
