Two rival Ethereum proposals aim to stop Glamsterdam breaking old contracts

Ethereum’s next upgrade could break some of the apps that already hold users’ money, and two developers filed rival fixes on Sunday to stop it.

One plan, from Leo Glisic, would leave apps already on the network on today’s prices and charge the new rates only to apps launched afterward. The other, from Giulio Rebuffo, would charge everyone the new prices but let old apps keep running as if nothing had changed.

The problem they are trying to solve sits in Glamsterdam, Ethereum’s next big software upgrade. Two of its proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, raise the gas Ethereum charges for creating and touching stored data. Gas is the meter that prices every step a smart contract, the program behind an Ethereum app, takes. Under EIP-8037, the base charge for creating a contract rises from 32,000 gas to 183,600, before code storage and execution costs are added.

Many Ethereum apps were written on the assumption that these costs would never change. Some pay a fixed amount of gas each time they call another app, and if that call starts costing more, it fails. Many of those apps cannot be updated once they are live.

That risk has already slowed the upgrade. Glamsterdam runs on one of Ethereum’s practice networks, copies of the blockchain where developers test changes before they touch real money, but a second rehearsal set 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, which he said he had flagged to Ethereum’s core developers two weeks earlier.

Pseudonymous developer banteg was blunter. “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.”

Glisic’s draft, EIP-8488, splits Ethereum’s instruction set in two. “Existing contracts keep the legacy schedule,” it says, while “new contracts must use V2 opcodes that carry the EIP-8037/8038 gas schedule.”

Rebuffo’s draft runs two gas meters per transaction instead, one that tracks execution under the old rules and one where “billing uses the new schedule and determines the transaction fee.” It also admits “no execution-client implementation or consensus tests have been run for this design.”

Both are draft proposals, and neither names a target date. The next private test of the upgrade, which developers estimated on Oct. 29 for Nov. 16 to 20 at the earliest, was planned before either draft existed.