Ethereum’s plan to triple network speed could silently break millions of existing smart contracts
Ethereum's next attempt to expand base-layer throughput includes contracts and transactions that create persistent state, which would cost far more gas for new accounts, storage slots, and deployed bytecode.
The Ethereum Foundation said the candidate Glamsterdam schedule is designed to support roughly three times more base throughput by aligning gas charges with the network resources each operation consumes.
The two proposals are scheduled for Glamsterdam, yet EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 both retain formal Review status. Ethereum's official roadmap plans the upgrade for the fourth quarter of 2026, with fixed Sepolia, Hoodi, and mainnet fork dates still unannounced.
That leaves builders a testing window before the candidate parameters and deployment schedule harden.
Higher throughput moves the bill to state creation Every new account, storage slot, and byte of contract code expands the persistent state that nodes retain and serve. EIP-8037 says the state portion of a Geth database was about 390 GiB in January 2026.
After Ethereum's gas limit rose from 30 million to 60 million, average new state created each day increased from roughly 105 MiB to 326 MiB, an annual pace of about 116 GiB.
The proposal takes that post-increase rate and scales it proportionally to a deliberately severe 200 million gas-limit scenario. The result is roughly 387 GiB of annual growth, enough to cross a cited 650 GiB performance threshold within a year from the 390 GiB starting point.
The EIP describes the earlier 30 million-to-60 million response as non-linear, making 387 GiB a motivating extrapolation rather than a measured forecast.
Its proposed control is a common cost of 1,530 gas for every byte of new state and a separate state-gas dimension. At a reference block limit of 150 million, that parameter targets average growth of 120 GiB a year.
The proposal lists 160 GiB a year as the worst case at a 200 million limit after repricing.
State-creation operation Current charge Candidate state-gas charge Create a new account 25,000 183,600 Create a new storage slot 20,000 97,920 Deploy 24 KiB of code plus a new account 4,947,200 37,784,880 At the transaction level, users pay for both execution and state gas. The split preserves room for computational work while placing a separate ceiling on permanent additions to network state.
EIP-8038 tackles access to and writes of existing state, raising selected account and storage costs from client benchmarks conducted against a state snapshot comparable to mainnet in March 2026.
Together, the proposals use the roughly threefold throughput figure as an engineering support target. Activation would create headroom for higher limits rather than guarantee an immediate tripling of mainnet capacity.
Related Reading Ethereum’s 2026 roadmap includes this validator risk that's bigger than you think A 929.7 million-transaction replay separates higher-limit fixes from code changes The public repricing impact dashboard covers 929,731,274 transactions in 4 million blocks from Dec. 3, 2024, through June 15, 2026.
Each transaction was replayed independently against its canonical pre-transaction state under the existing schedule and one candidate schedule. Researchers first used the transaction's original gas limit, then allowed a ceiling up to 10 times that limit.
The comparison covered success, gas consumption, logs, output, and execution traces.
Under EIP-8037, 174,473,898 transaction replays failed at their original limit but succeeded with more gas, while 2,687,652 entered the potentially broken group. Under EIP-8038, 84,708,228 were fixable with a higher limit, and 3,036,537 were potentially broken.
Repeated activity from a busy application can dominate the count, so the figures do not describe millions of separate contracts at risk.
August 28, 2026 1
