Devs to Ethereum Core Team: 'Please Don't Break the Chain'

Ethereum's next hard fork has a problem its roadmap posts don't mention. Several prominent developers are now asking the core team to stop Glamsterdam in its current form. Their reason is blunt. The gas changes could break smart contracts that hold user funds.

"Please don't break the chain," one developer wrote on X.

Anon, let me explain. Glamsterdam is the fork after Fusaka. It bundles enshrined proposer-builder separation with a repricing of gas costs on the execution layer. On paper that's plumbing. In practice, gas prices are baked into almost every contract you've ever touched.

The Warning

Here's the sequence. Core developers have been assembling Glamsterdam as a package deal, with the gas repricing treated as a routine efficiency fix. Cheap state access. Predictable costs. Better throughput for everyone.

Then the pushback landed. A group of long-time Ethereum devs publicly urged the core team to pause the fork rather than ship the repricing as designed. Their argument isn't about performance. It's about survivability. Contracts written years ago assume certain opcodes cost certain amounts. Change the price, and those assumptions stop holding.

The part that matters most. One developer who backed the repricing early has now reversed his stance.

That flip isn't noise. When the people who pushed for a change start walking it back, something real surfaced during testing. This is bigger than people realize.

The Gas Math Doesn't Forgive

Think about how much of DeFi is built on frozen cost assumptions. The 2,300 gas stipend baked into a plain ETH transfer. The 63/64 rule that governs how much gas gets forwarded to a subcall. Contracts that call.sendand never check the return value.

Reprice an opcode and a function that ran fine for four years suddenly blows past its gas budget. It reverts. Or worse, it doesn't revert, it just becomes uncallable. Funds sit behind a door nobody can open.

Real talk: nobody notices that until the vault is already full.

So who wins here? Cheaper state access helps L2s and client teams. It makes the network more predictable at scale. The losers are DeFi protocols with old bytecode, multisigs with hardcoded gas limits, and every fork of Uniswap that's been quietly running since 2021.

Who's on the hook when a $40 million vault goes read-only because an opcode got three times more expensive? Right now, nobody's name is on that answer.

The chain doesn't lie. It also doesn't forgive a hardcoded assumption.

What I'd Watch Next

My take, and it's not a popular one: repricing without a migration window is reckless. Ethereum's whole edge is that code deployed in 2018 still runs in 2026. Break that promise once and you've changed what the platform is, not just how it performs.

So watch three things. First, the next All Core Devs call. If the repricing gets split into its own fork, that's the core team blinking. Second, whether anyone publishes a simulation of real mainnet contracts under the new gas schedule. Vague reassurances won't cut it. Third, the developer who flipped. If more backers follow him, Glamsterdam gets delayed.

And if you run a protocol with gas assumptions written pre-2022? Start auditing now. Nobody's going to do it for you, and the fork schedule won't wait.