Ethereum core developers are requesting assistance from application teams to evaluate whether proposed gas modifications in the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade require revision, as internal audits cannot account for every project’s contracts and off-chain services.
In a November 6 Ethereum Foundation blog post, Marius van der Wijden called on developers and auditors to examine eight gas assumptions impacted by the proposed upgrade. Security firms ChainSecurity and Dedaub are conducting investigations alongside internal reviews, though the process also requires projects to explain how they would remediate affected systems.
The Hoodi testnet’s planned October 26 activation and accompanying 200 million gas limit increase were postponed on October 22. The November 6 appeal states the delay continues pending resolution, while mainnet activation remains unscheduled.
The implications range from relayers recovering insufficient transaction costs to wallet authorizations becoming reusable after specific failure modes. This makes application repairability a key factor for developers weighing changes to the upgrade.
Glamsterdam’s EIP-8037 would increase the cost of creating persistent blockchain data and meter that state growth separately from execution, while EIP-8038 would reprice access and writes to existing state. The goal is to support higher throughput while controlling the data Ethereum nodes must retain.
The eight-invariant framework separates three price assumptions—covering fixed budgets and reserves—from five accounting assumptions involving gas returns, failure handling, billing, and delegation.
Gas Accounting Changes Affect Payments and Wallet Safety
A relayer pays to execute a transaction for another party and may recover that expense by measuring gas before and after the work. The framework’s INV-5 entry explains how the proposed accounting can disrupt that calculation.
Under EIP-8037, a transaction initially funds a separate state-gas reservoir when its gas limit exceeds 16,777,216. State creation draws from that pool first, then execution gas. Solidity’s gasleft() reading excludes the reservoir, so subtracting two readings can miss costs the relayer actually pays.
If the later reading exceeds the earlier one, checked subtraction reverts, blocking the operation. Unchecked subtraction can wrap into a large number and potentially produce excessive reimbursement, depending on the surrounding arithmetic and payment checks.
Meanwhile, invisible reservoir spending can leave users undercharged and operators covering the shortfall.
The billing guidance suggests agreeing on a user-signed fee using an estimate under the new rules. Where metering remains necessary, clamping the subtraction and capping payment at a signed maximum limits the charge, while reservoir-funded costs remain outside the measurement.
An open specification proposal, PR #12581, would prevent gas readings from increasing. That would address the subtraction problem, but the reservoir’s billing blind spot would remain.
ONE COLD NEW-SLOT WRITE 110,020total gas 12,100 execution gas 97,920 state gas Proposed EIP-8037 / EIP-8038 charges
ONE COLD NEW-SLOT WRITE 110,020total gas 12,100 execution 97,920 state Proposed EIP-8037 / EIP-8038 charges
Which balance pays the state charge?
Which balance pays the state charge?Reservoir fundedReservoir empty
Illustrative state with at least 97,920 gas in the reservoir at this write. The execution balance pays 12,100 and the reservoir pays 97,920.
EXECUTION BALANCE 12,100gas funds execution gasleft() drop 12,100 STATE-GAS RESERVOIR 97,920gas funds state creation Outside gasleft() NEW SLOT 110,020 total gas EXECUTION BALANCE STATE RESERVOIR 12,10097,920 gas paysexecution gas pays statecreation gasleft() drop 12,100 Outside gasleft() NEW SLOT 110,020 total gas
Illustrative state with zero reservoir gas at this write. The execution balance pays the complete 110,020 charge, including the state component.
EXECUTION BALANCE 110,020gas funds both components gasleft() drop 110,020 STATE-GAS RESERVOIR 0gas available at this write State cost draws on execution NEW SLOT 110,020 total gas EXECUTION BALANCE STATE RESERVOIR 110,0200 gas paysboth components gas availableat this write gasleft() drop 110,020 Paid from execution NEW SLOT 110,020 total gas
A funded reservoir can pay the state charge outside gasleft(), while an empty reservoir shifts that charge to the execution balance.
Proposed rules checked November 6, 2026. Operation-level charges exclude intrinsic, wrapper and incidental instruction costs. Initial reservoir funding requires a transaction gas limit above 16,777,216, and later refills may also fund it. Intermediate reservoir balances split the state charge between balances.
INV-8 examines EIP-7702 delegation, where an account authorizes delegated contract code. Under the proposed rules, insufficient gas during pre-execution can leave a transaction included in a block while rolling back its delegation and authorization-related update to the account’s sequence number, or nonce.
An exposed authorization that still satisfies its validity checks, including the authorizing account’s nonce, can then be reused. If the delegated contract also has an initializer that lets the first caller choose the owner, an attacker could apply the authorization and initialize ownership in a single transaction.
Authorization front-running already existed in public mempools, but here a failed mined transaction can expose a reusable authorization even after private submission.
Delegations already applied before the top-level execution frame remain in place when that later frame fails. A failed receipt requires further checking of the account’s resulting code and nonce.
Suggested wallet safeguards include binding initialization to the account’s signature or self-calls and invalidating exposed authorizations. Charging the worst-case authorization cost upfront has also been proposed as a protocol change and remains unadopted.
Repair Options Feed Into Upgrade Decision
Under the proposed schedule, creating a cold storage slot costs 110,020 total gas, versus 22,100 under Osaka. Of that proposed total, 12,100 is execution gas, and 97,920 is state gas, with the reservoir determining which balance funds the latter.
ChainSecurity’s October 13 research shows how changed costs and returned gas can let a contract finish recording an underfunded operation as permanently unsuccessful. If that record removes the retry path, a valid operation can become impossible to repeat.
Revalidated budgets, propagating failures, and preserving retries address different parts of that risk.
The repository asks affected projects whether a setting, upgrade, or migration can fix their problem, and roughly when. Those answers help developers assess how much compatibility work applications can absorb and where specification changes could prevent damage.
Concrete reports of what breaks and how to repair it will inform the next specification discussions.
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