Ethereum's Rush to Triple Throughput May Break Millions

Ethereum's upcoming network upgrade plans to triple its base-layer throughput, but this could have an unintended consequence: breaking millions of existing smart contracts.

The Ethereum Foundation has proposed two solutions, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, which would increase the cost of creating new accounts, storage slots, and contract code. According to the proposal, every new account or byte of contract code expands the persistent state that nodes retain and serve, leading to increased gas costs.

The current gas limit for creating a new account is 25,000, but under the proposed changes, this would increase to 183,600. Similarly, deploying 24 KiB of code plus a new account would cost 4,947,200 gas units currently, but would increase to 37,784,880.

The proposals aim to support roughly three times more base throughput by aligning gas charges with the network resources each operation consumes. However, critics have raised concerns that this could silently break millions of existing smart contracts, which rely on specific gas prices and transaction patterns.