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.