Ethereum developers are being urged to test applications ahead of the Glamsterdam upgrade, which will significantly reprice operations involving network state. EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 are scheduled for inclusion in Glamsterdam and will change the gas costs associated with creating and accessing Ethereum state, potentially affecting contracts built around fixed gas assumptions.
In its official August 24 developer advisory, the Ethereum Foundation said historical mainnet transactions had been replayed under the new pricing schedule to identify compatibility issues. The large majority of contracts behaved normally, while a relatively small group either required higher gas limits or showed potentially breaking behavior.
State Creation and Access Become More Expensive
EIP-8037 targets state creation, including new accounts, storage slots and deployed contract bytecode. The official EIP-8037 specification introduces separate metering for state creation and harmonizes costs around the amount of new state generated. The objective is to constrain long-term state growth while giving Ethereum room to increase throughput and future block gas limits.
EIP-8038 addresses the other side of the equation by repricing state access. Operations including SSTORE, SLOAD, cold account access, EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY become more expensive to reflect measured performance against Ethereum’s larger database. State-operation pricing has not received a comparable broad adjustment since the Berlin upgrade in 2021, while Ethereum’s state and block capacity have expanded considerably since then.
The Foundation found that the contracts most exposed to the new schedule generally rely on hardcoded gas behavior. Examples include fixed stipends, calls with preset gas values, logic branching on gasleft() and presigned transactions with fixed limits. Many flagged transactions succeed after simply increasing their gas limit, but some contracts may require code-level changes before Glamsterdam activates.
Platåberget Gives Builders an Early Testing Environment
Developers can already test those assumptions on Platåberget, the temporary public testnet announced by the Ethereum Foundation on August 17. The network runs Glamsterdam-era functionality and is intended to remain available for several months before the upgrade moves through Sepolia and Hoodi. Platåberget gives wallets, indexers, RPC providers and smart-contract teams a controlled environment for identifying incompatibilities before mainnet activation.
The Foundation also released a repricing-impact tool that lets developers search specific contract addresses for historical transactions affected by the new gas rules. Wallet and RPC infrastructure operators face their own requirement: eth_estimateGas implementations and cached gas constants must account for the revised pricing. Regular Ethereum users are not expected to take action, provided the wallets and infrastructure they rely on are updated correctly.
Ethereum currently plans Glamsterdam for Q4 2026, according to its official protocol roadmap. The repricing is intended to support substantially higher Layer-1 throughput without allowing state growth to impose unsustainable costs on node operators. For developers, the immediate priority is compatibility testing: Glamsterdam aims to make Ethereum more scalable, but contracts built around outdated gas assumptions may need intervention before the new schedule reaches mainnet.