Ethereum (ETH) was trading around $2,490 as the gas fee schedule overhaul planned for the end-of-year Glamsterdam upgrade—intended to raise the mainnet capacity to about three times its current level—raised questions about certain existing smart contracts.
Key points:
The Glamsterdam upgrade for Ethereum is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026 and aims to support a baseline execution capacity that is about three times higher.
Tests by the Ethereum Foundation conclude that most contracts would not be affected, but applications relying on rigid gas assumptions might need adjustments.
ETH remained close to $2,500, while developers were assessing the impact of the new gas schedule on creating and accessing state.
Overhaul of the gas schedule on Ethereum
Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026, according to the network’s official roadmap. The Ethereum Foundation detailed its gas schedule revision plans on August 24. No firm mainnet deployment date has been set yet.
EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 proposals must modify the cost of creating and accessing state, so as to better align fees with the resources actually consumed by these operations as the network’s capacity increases. In historical re-examinations of transactions, most contracts showed no significant impact.
The smaller set considered at risk includes contracts that depend on fixed gas stipends, hard-coded call values, or gas-based logic that relies on the remaining gas. Developers can test potentially affected applications on the Platåberget testnet before Glamsterdam is rolled out on Ethereum’s longer-duration testnets, and then on mainnet.
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ETH price outlook
At the time of the report, ETH was trading around $2,490, just below $2,500. An initial near-term resistance zone was cited between $2,550 and $2,600, while support was around $2,400 to $2,450. A lower consolidation zone was identified between $2,200 and $2,250, keeping the $2,500 threshold at the center of attention.
The gas schedule overhaul is a major issue, because higher capacity can increase the amount of “persistent” state that node operators must store and process over time. EIP-8037 estimates that with a gas limit raised to 200 million, if state growth followed proportionally the recent pace, it could add about 387 GiB per year.
Such a pace could bring the network closer to the threshold of around 650 GiB mentioned as a level associated with performance degradation, even though the proposal stresses that this is an extrapolation rather than a firm forecast.
Nevertheless, the Foundation’s tests suggest that the immediate risk for contracts is more limited than one might have feared.
The creation of new state had already accelerated before the start of the Glamsterdam tests. EIP-8037 notes that the daily amount of new state increased from about 105 MiB to 326 MiB after raising the gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, while Geth’s state database stood at around 390 GiB in January 2026.
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