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Ethereum upgrades could raise state costs and risk contract replay failures
Ethereum Foundation candidate proposals for Glamsterdam aim to align gas with resource use, projecting state growth under a 200 million gas-limit scenario that could reach about 387 GiB annually.
Ethereum is considering base-layer changes that would substantially increase network throughput, but the proposals also warn they could cause contract replay failures for existing smart contracts, depending on how they handle execution and state changes. According to CryptoSlate, the Ethereum Foundation said the candidate Glamsterdam schedule would target roughly three times more base throughput by aligning gas charges with the network resources each operation consumes. The upgrade is tied to two proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, which both remained in Review status at the time of reporting, even as the fourth quarter of 2026 was outlined for the broader roadmap with specific fork dates still not announced.
EIP-8037 focuses on the persistent state created by new accounts, storage slots, and contract bytecode, which costs far more gas under the candidate parameters. The EIP cites that the state portion of a Geth database was about 390 GiB in January 2026, and after Ethereum’s gas limit rose from 30 million to 60 million, average new state created per day increased from roughly 105 MiB to 326 MiB, implying about 116 GiB of annual growth.
The proposal scales that post-change rate to a deliberately severe 200 million gas-limit scenario, projecting about 387 GiB of annual growth, enough to cross a cited 650 GiB performance threshold within a year from the 390 GiB starting point. CryptoSlate also reports EIP-8038 addresses access to and writes of existing state by raising selected account and storage costs based on client benchmarks from a state snapshot comparable to mainnet in March 2026.
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