Ethereum's upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade alters gas charges
Glamsterdam introduces a state-gas charge for new accounts, warning that tools using a fixed gas limit will break after the upgrade activates.
Megan Sutherland 5 min read
Ethereum’s protocol developers have started warning wallet builders, indexers and gas-estimation services that a piece of long-standing arithmetic they may have baked into their code is about to stop being true. The change arrives with Glamsterdam, the network’s next scheduled upgrade, and it touches one of the most basic assumptions in Ethereum tooling: that a plain ETH transfer always costs exactly 21,000 units of gas.
A second gas dimension
Glamsterdam’s core change, tracked as EIP-8037, introduces what developers are calling a “state-gas” dimension, a separate charge that applies specifically to operations creating new entries in Ethereum’s state, such as sending ETH to an address that has never held a balance before. Under the new model, a transfer between two accounts that already exist still costs the familiar 21,000 gas. A transfer that creates a brand-new account on the network incurs an additional state-gas charge on top of that base cost. The upgrade also enshrines proposer-builder separation directly into the protocol, introduces block-level access lists, and raises the size limits on smart contracts and their initialization code.
Why account creation costs more than a transfer between existing accounts
The distinction Glamsterdam is drawing rests on how Ethereum’s state actually works under the hood. Ethereum’s state is effectively a giant table mapping every address that has ever held a balance or interacted with the network to its current balance, nonce and, for contracts, its code and storage. Every node on the network has to store and maintain that entire table to validate new blocks, and it only grows over time, since Ethereum has no built-in mechanism for removing an address once it has been created. Sending ETH between two accounts that already exist in that table is a comparatively cheap operation, since it only updates two existing entries. Sending ETH to an address that has never held a balance before requires the network to add an entirely new entry to that permanently growing table, which is a categorically different kind of work from updating an existing one. State-gas is Ethereum’s attempt to price that difference honestly, charging the operation that permanently grows the network’s long-term storage burden more than the operation that merely moves value between entries that already exist.
Why the warning went out
The Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol DevOps team said plainly that any tool relying on a hardcoded maximum gas limit “will break” once Glamsterdam activates, and needs to be updated before then. The affected category is broad by design rather than by accident: wallets that estimate transaction costs, block explorers and indexers that validate transaction data, and gas-estimation services that assume a single gas dimension covers every ETH transfer are all built on the pre-Glamsterdam assumption that is about to become incomplete.
How Ethereum stages a major upgrade
Ethereum’s approach to shipping protocol changes follows a well-established sequence precisely because a mistake at the base layer can affect every application and every user built on top of it, with no straightforward way to roll back an error once it has been live on mainnet processing real transactions. A proposed change first runs on one or more purpose-built devnets, throwaway test networks used by client development teams to shake out implementation bugs. It then graduates to public, long-running testnets such as Sepolia and Hoodi, which mirror mainnet’s rules but use worthless test ETH, giving wallet providers, infrastructure operators and application developers a live environment to test their own integrations against before any real funds are at stake. Only once an upgrade has run without incident across that sequence, typically for a period of weeks, does core development coordinate a mainnet activation date. Plataberget’s role as Glamsterdam’s first public testnet is the opening step of that sequence, not a preview of a near-term mainnet date.
Where the upgrade stands
Glamsterdam has already reached its first public testnet, Plataberget, which launched on August 13, 2026. The upgrade was scheduled to activate on that testnet on August 20, 2026, the next step in a rollout sequence that continues with deployments to the Sepolia and Hoodi testnets before any mainnet activation date is set. That staged sequence, standard for major Ethereum upgrades, is meant to give exactly the wallet and infrastructure teams the Foundation is now warning to catch integration problems before real funds are at stake.
The other pieces bundled into the same upgrade
State-gas is the change generating the most urgent warnings to infrastructure teams, but it is not the only significant item in Glamsterdam. Enshrined proposer-builder separation formalizes, at the protocol level, a division of labour that already exists informally on Ethereum today, where specialized entities called builders assemble the most profitable possible block and validators, or proposers, simply select among the blocks offered to them rather than constructing blocks themselves. Moving that arrangement into the protocol itself, rather than leaving it to an ecosystem of external software that validators opt into, is intended to make the system more resistant to manipulation and to reduce the influence any single builder can exert over transaction ordering, an issue that has drawn scrutiny given how much of Ethereum’s block-building market has consolidated around a small number of builders in recent years. Block-level access lists, meanwhile, are a step toward allowing Ethereum’s execution clients to process the transactions within a block in parallel rather than strictly one after another, which is a prerequisite for eventually raising the network’s base-layer throughput further without a proportional increase in the computational burden on individual nodes.
What it means for everyday users
For most ETH holders sending routine transfers, Glamsterdam is not expected to change day-to-day costs in a way that is immediately obvious. Where it matters more is for anyone building or running infrastructure on top of Ethereum, and indirectly for users of any wallet or service that has not updated its gas-estimation logic by the time the upgrade reaches mainnet, since an outdated estimate could mean a transaction is priced incorrectly or fails to account for the new state-gas charge on a first-time transfer to a new address. The most exposed group in practice is likely to be anyone sending ETH for the first time to a newly generated address, a common pattern for exchanges distributing withdrawals to fresh wallets, cross-chain bridges creating destination addresses, or any service that programmatically generates a new address per transaction, since those are precisely the transactions that will incur the new charge.