Glamsterdam cuts fees ~78%

Ethereum’s next big upgrade is not just “fees down.” It’s a plumbing rewrite. Glamsterdam is the fork where Ethereum tries to make Layer 1 meaningfully bigger without making the chain harder to run. And the news from the last big developer push is that the core pieces are finally lining up — enough for teams to leave Svalbard with a credible 200M gas-limit floor and working multi-client ePBS testnets. (blog.ethereum.org) ### What actually happened in Svalbard? At the Soldøgn interop in Longyearbyen, more than 100 Ethereum contributors spent a week hardening Glamsterdam. (eips.ethereum.org) By the end, they had three concrete outputs: alignment on a post-Glamsterdam gas-limit floor of 200M, stable enshrined proposer-builder separation implementations running with external builders, and finalized EIP-8037 repricing numbers. (ethereum.org) That is real progress, not roadmap poetry. ### Why is 200M gas such a big deal? Ethereum mainnet spent 2025 climbing from 30M to 60M gas, and even that was treated carefully because bigger blocks stress clients, bandwidth, and storage. A 200M floor would be more than 3x today’s 60M level. But the point is not “just raise the knob.” Glamsterdam bundles changes that give validators and clients more breathing room so larger blocks do not immediately turn into worse decentralization. (blog.ethereum.org) ### So where does the “78% fee cut” come from? Mostly from one proposal — EIP-2780. It cuts Ethereum’s intrinsic transaction base cost from 21,000 gas to 4,500. That is a 78.6% reduction in the base component, which is where the viral number comes from. But a normal ETH transfer would not cost 4,500 gas total. (blog.ethereum.org) The current draft says a simple transfer would come out around 7,756 gas after adding other charges, including touching the recipient account and the transfer log. ### Why isn’t that the whole story? Because Glamsterdam is also repricing a lot of things upward. The whole gas-repricing package exists to make gas costs match actual resource usage better. Some operations were underpriced, especially around state growth and worst-case block size. (blog.ethereum.org) So yes, simple transfers get cheaper, but other actions that burden the network more heavily can get more expensive. The goal is not blanket discounts. It is better pricing so Ethereum can scale safely. ### What does ePBS change? ePBS — enshrined proposer-builder separation — changes how blocks are assembled and revealed. Basically, it formalizes the builder pipeline inside the protocol and restructures slot timing so execution has clearer deadlines and more headroom. (eips.ethereum.org) That matters because Ethereum has been bottlenecked not only by raw computation, but by how fast block data can be built, propagated, and verified inside a 12-second cadence. ### Why keep talking about state growth? Because storage is the part you do not get to forget. If Ethereum raises throughput without charging properly for writing new state, node hardware requirements creep up and home operators get squeezed out. EIP-8037 sits at the center of that fix by raising the price of state creation so higher gas limits do not translate into runaway database bloat. (eips.ethereum.org) ### Does this mean 10x throughput is locked in? Not really. Ethereum research and ecosystem commentary point to much higher theoretical throughput once ePBS, block access lists, and parallelization machinery mature, but the official deliverable today is more modest and more concrete: the upgrade is being prepared to support a credible 200M gas floor after Glamsterdam. (blog.ethereum.org) The bigger “10x” story is directionally the ambition, not a shipped guarantee. ### Bottom line? The real story is not that Ethereum found a magic fee coupon. It is that core developers now have a more believable path to making L1 bigger. If Glamsterdam lands with ePBS, repricing, and a 200M gas floor, simple transactions should get cheaper and block capacity should rise — but the deeper win is that Ethereum would be scaling without pretending storage and node costs do not exist. (blog.ethereum.org)