Summary
- Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, will end the long-standing rule that every basic ether (ETH) transfer costs a flat 21,000 units of gas.
- Under the change, sending ETH to an existing account will still cost 21,000 gas, but transfers to never-before-used addresses will incur an additional 183,600 units of new “state gas.”
- Ethereum developers are warning wallet providers and blockchain services to update any software that assumes 21,000 gas is both the minimum and maximum for ETH transfers before Glamsterdam reaches mainnet.
Sending ether ETH$1,898.64 will no longer always carry the same network fee, breaking one of Ethereum’s oldest rules of thumb.
Developers from the Ethereum Foundation, the nonprofit that supports and maintains Ethereum, told wallet makers, blockchain trackers, and fee calculators in a blog post to update any software built on the assumption that a basic ETH transfer costs 21,000 gas units. Gas is how Ethereum measures the work a transaction asks the network to do, and users pay for that work in ETH.
Today, that 21,000 applies whether the receiving account has been used before or not. Under Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, sending to an existing account still costs 21,000, while sending to an address that has never appeared in Ethereum’s records costs more because the network has to create and permanently store a new account.
The proposal puts that extra charge at 183,600 units of a new category called state gas.
