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Ethereum developers have submitted competing proposals to protect existing smart contracts from planned gas changes in the Glamsterdam upgrade. Leo Glisic and Giulio Rebuffo filed their separate drafts on Nov. 8, after security reviews found that some applications could fail under the proposed rules.
Both plans seek to preserve the behavior of contracts already running on Ethereum. However, they differ over whether those contracts should continue paying old gas rates or face the new charges.
EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 aim to change how Ethereum charges for creating and accessing stored data. Gas measures the resources used by transactions, including contracts that manage funds, tokens and other services. The revised prices aim to better reflect the burden that stored data places on the network.
Under the draft rules, creating a new account would carry a state charge of 183,600 gas, up from 25,000. Contract creation would face that state charge plus a separate 12,000-gas execution charge, excluding code storage. Some existing contracts rely on fixed gas allowances or assume gas remaining can only decline. Those assumptions may fail if the prices change.
Glisic's EIP-8488 would preserve existing gas rates for deployed contracts. New contracts would instead use revised software instructions, known as V2 opcodes, and pay costs set by EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. In his submission, Glisic wrote, “Existing contracts keep the legacy schedule.”
The draft also places conditions on how newly deployed contracts interact with older code. In particular, a new version of DELEGATECALL would require the receiving contract to support V2 instructions. The plan excludes instructions that allow new contracts to check remaining gas or gas limits. These changes would require developers to adapt code for future deployments.
Rebuffo's proposal takes a different approach. It would use two separate gas counters for each transaction. One would calculate execution under previous rules so established contracts keep operating as expected. The other would apply updated rates to determine what users pay.
The draft states that “billing uses the new schedule and determines the transaction fee.” It also says a transaction would stop if its billing allowance runs out, even when the old-rule counter still shows gas available. Rebuffo acknowledges that no execution-client implementation or consensus tests have yet run. His proposal was submitted without a final EIP number.
The Ethereum Foundation postponed Glamsterdam's planned Oct. 26 activation on the Hoodi test network after developers raised compatibility concerns. Its Oct. 22 notice said the delay would allow more checks on EIP-8037's interaction with contracts already live on Ethereum. The pause also halted a planned increase in Hoodi's gas limit to 200 million.
On Nov. 6, Ethereum Foundation developer Marius van der Wijden said the group was working with ChainSecurity and Dedaub to study potential failures. The foundation asked contract teams and auditors to check eight assumptions that the planned changes could break. It also requested reports from affected projects to help guide the next developer discussions.
Pseudonymous developer banteg said an analysis had identified about 200,000 potentially affected contracts, although the figure does not establish that all would fail. Neither rival proposal has received approval, and developers have not announced a replacement Hoodi date or a confirmed mainnet launch. The previously discussed Nov. 16–20 private testing window was tentative and preceded the new drafts.
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