Ethereum Warns of Contract Risks Ahead of Glamsterdam Upgrade
Ethereum (ETH)
Editor:
Eugene Serbin
u.today reports that Ethereum developers have issued an alert for Layer 1 contract users on the ETH mainnet as the Glamsterdam upgrade progresses. The Ethereum Foundation provided a heads-up for anyone maintaining L1 contracts ahead of the scheduled upgrade in Q4 2026. The upcoming update includes gas repricings via EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, which will shift state creation and access costs.
While most contracts remain unaffected, a small set may break or degrade without updates due to hardcoded gas values. Replaying historical transactions under the new schedule reveals that some contracts rely on assumptions that the new schedule changes. The bulk of these concerns can be resolved with an increase in the gas limit.
Gas prices for state operations were last adjusted in the Berlin fork in 2021, after which Ethereum's state grew significantly. Repricing these operations is a prerequisite for increasing the gas limit further to support roughly a 3x increase in base throughput. The Glamsterdam upgrade, named for the combination of Amsterdam and Gloas, aims to scale L1 by reorganizing transaction handling and database management.
How the market reacted
Whalio's own Binance spot order flow for ETH, measured when this story was written up on 26 August 2026. Not the outlet's figures.
ETH is trading at $2,506.78 with a 1-hour buy ratio of 55.0%, indicating short-term buying dominance. However, the 4-hour buy ratio drops to 40.4%, suggesting that buying pressure is fading over a slightly longer timeframe compared to the immediate hour. The 24-hour buy ratio sits at 51.2%, showing a neutral-to-slight bullish bias over the full day. Volume delta reflects this shift, with positive inflows of $7,944,358 in the last hour contrasting with outflows of $11,321,838 over four hours. Cumulative volume delta for the 24-hour period closes at +$18,069,472, indicating net buying pressure over the day. Spot volume reached $617,837,179 across 2,687,659 trades in the last 24 hours.
The latest daily buy ratio of 46.8% sits at the 16th percentile of the last 322 days, against a median of 49.5% - weaker buying than most days.
Twenty-four hours later
What ETH did over the 23 hours after the story broke. The market moves for its own reasons; this is what happened, not what the story caused.
Was that an ordinary day?
The same Binance spot measurements for ETH, averaged over the days leading up to the story.
Over the preceding week, the 7-day average buy ratio was 51.4%, making the latest day's 51.2% reading nearly identical to the weekly trend. Volume relative to the average was 0.48x, indicating that trading activity was less than half of the typical weekly level. This represents an ordinary day for the coin in terms of directional bias, though volume was notably subdued. The price changed +11.3% over the 8-day period, with a total volume delta of +$343,346,378. Net buying occurred on 6 of the 7 days in the preceding week.