Ethereum Foundation Announces Glamsterdam Status Gas Will Impact Wallets and Indexers
The Ethereum Foundation announced that the Gas repricing in Glamsterdam will render wallets, indexers, and Gas estimators that rely on hardcoded maximum Gas limits ineffective, requiring developers to update their systems.
The Platåberget public testnet is now open and will run continuously for several months; the Glamsterdam fork is scheduled to activate on August 20 on this testnet for developers to test compatibility before deploying on Sepolia, Hoodi, and the mainnet.
EIP-8037 introduces a separate "status Gas" dimension for creating new on-chain states. New accounts, deploying contract code, or writing to new storage slots will incur additional charges based on the number of status bytes and CPSB at runtime.
The base cost for transferring ETH to existing accounts remains 21,000 Gas, but this cost is split into transaction base fees, cold account access fees, and transfer value fees; if the recipient address has not yet been created on-chain, additional status Gas for account creation must be paid.
As a result, the default wallet logic of "all ETH transfers only require 21,000 Gas" will underestimate some transaction costs; products that estimate transaction fees solely based on a single Gas dimension will also fail to correctly handle the combination of execution Gas and status Gas.
The upgrade will also involve collaborative Gas repricing, aiming to push the minimum Gas capacity of blocks to around 200 million; the pricing of individual operations will also change, and fixed maximum Gas limits, old transaction simulation logic, and old exception handling processes may trigger failures or incorrect pricing.
Glamsterdam also includes native proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists, and increased limits on contract and initialization code sizes. The Ethereum roadmap marks this upgrade target for Q4 2026, with the specific mainnet launch date yet to be finalized.
In terms of market mechanisms, status Gas will directly price the externality of "expanding Ethereum's global state": new accounts, contract deployments, and new storage will no longer only consume execution resources once, but will also incur additional costs for nodes to maintain and synchronize state over the long term. Data-intensive applications that frequently create wallets, deploy contracts, and write new storage will bear higher marginal costs; node operators and long-term network health will benefit from constraints on state expansion, while wallets, RPC service providers, L2 bridges, and indexing infrastructure will need to bear the costs of migration, simulation, and pricing system transformation first.
Source: Public Information
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Ethereum has long priced execution operations based on a single Gas metric, but the global state has costs that differ from one-time computations: nodes need to continuously store, synchronize, and verify accounts, contract code, and storage slots. Previously, while creating new accounts, deploying code, or writing new storage incurred fees, the resource consumption of long-term state was not explicitly displayed. EIP-8037 separates state expansion into an independent dimension, indicating that the protocol is moving from "execution throughput management" to a phase of "separate pricing for execution resources and state resources."
The capital path will shift from merely purchasing block execution space to purchasing "computational space + state space." For wallets, the first transfer to a new address is no longer a fixed cost; for DeFi, account abstraction, and blockchain games, large-scale account creation, smart contract deployment, or initializing storage for users will incur more nuanced marginal costs. As a result, project teams may migrate more user states to L2, off-chain indexing, Merkle commitments, or recoverable data structures to reduce the permanent writing of new states on L1.
This can be contrasted with the path introduced by EIP-4844, which brings Blob transactions. EIP-4844 distinguishes between short-term deletable data and permanent execution states, lowering data publishing costs for Rollups; EIP-8037 separates state creation from ordinary execution costs, preventing long-term state expansion from being underestimated by short-term transaction fees. Both point to the same architecture: measuring and pricing different resources—computation, block space, temporary data, and permanent state—separately.
Essentially, this represents a shift in pricing power: Ethereum transfers the costs of state expansion from being indiscriminately borne by all nodes to being borne by the transactions and applications that actually create the state. The mechanism is that the execution of ordinary transfers only occupies temporary block resources, while new accounts and new storage expand the data set that each full node must maintain long-term; without raising the marginal price of state creation, short-term traders can outsource long-term costs to node operators. Status Gas allows the protocol to price this externality, but also requires infrastructure and product teams to rewrite existing fixed Gas assumptions.
ABAB News · Laws of Cognition
Execution consumes once, state consumes a lifetime
Gas is not a fee, it is resource pricing
Free state expansion ultimately costs nodes