Ethereum’s next upgrade breaks the '21,000 gas' rule wallets rely on

Ethereum’s next upgrade breaks the '21,000 gas' rule wallets rely on Sending ETH to a brand-new address will cost more than sending to an existing one, and software built around a flat fee will get the sum wrong. - 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 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. Years of software have been built around that 21,000 as a fixed number. A wallet uses it to decide how much gas to attach to a payment, while a blockchain service uses it to sort transactions. Anything treating it as both the floor and the ceiling for an ETH transfer will reject valid payments or quote fees that come up short. The reasoning is that the two are not the same amount of work. Paying an account that already exists only adjusts balances Ethereum is tracking anyway, while paying a fresh address adds a record its computers may have to hold forever. Both have carried the same charge until now. Developers still have time to find the problems. Glamsterdam switches on Thursday on Platåberget, a practice version of Ethereum that uses worthless tokens so developers can break things safely. It reaches two more test networks - Sepolia and Hoodi - after that, and then the real Ethereum. Nobody sending ETH needs to do anything this week. The warning is aimed at the companies whose software those users depend on. - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold. Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold. Why it matters: Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade aims to scale shielded payments, improve quantum readiness, and test whether its funding, security, and governance can hold.