(SeaPRwire) –
You cannot fix a machine by breaking the gears that hold it together. That is the blunt reality of the Glamsterdam upgrade. Two developers filed rival proposals on November 8. They want to stop the new gas pricing rules from killing existing smart contracts. The core issue is simple math. EIP-8037 raises the base charge to create a contract from 32,000 gas to 183,600. Many apps were built on the belief that these costs would stay fixed. Some set aside a fixed amount of gas when calling another app. A price rise will cause those calls to fail. Security firm ChainSecurity found eight such assumptions that could break.
The damage scope is not theoretical. Researchers say about 200,000 existing contracts could be affected. Some of these hold user funds and cannot be updated. Michael Egorov, founder of Curve Finance, warned of a possible emergency hard fork. He called it a scenario with “a lot of drama.” Ryan Berckmans, an investor, reversed his stance. He had backed moving ahead quickly. Now he says he was wrong. Security researcher pcaversaccio noted that gas increases were flagged to core developers two weeks earlier. Pseudonymous developer banteg said a public analysis listed the 200,000 affected contracts. Flaws in the method could mean many more were missed.
Leo Glisic proposed splitting Ethereum’s instruction set in two. Existing contracts would keep the old gas schedule. New contracts would use “V2” opcodes with new pricing. Giulio Rebuffo suggested running two gas meters in each transaction. One tracks execution under old rules. The other sets the actual fee using new prices. Neither proposal has been approved for Glamsterdam. Neither names a target date. Rebuffo’s draft states that no execution client implementation or consensus tests have been run for the design. The October 26 Glamsterdam activation on the Hoodi test network was postponed. The delay covered Amsterdam execution layer changes. It also included Gloas consensus changes and a plan to raise Hoodi’s gas limit to 200 million.
Ethereum is not a product. It is a promise of stability. Break the promise and the value evaporates. The current proposals are untested. The risk is massive. If you build on Ethereum, assume the gas prices will change. But do not assume your legacy code will survive the transition without a manual fix. The network is pausing to think. It should.