EIP-8279 tightens gas accounting ahead of Glamsterdam

An Ethereum EIP commit dated October 21, 2026 touches EIP-8279 in exactly two places: it yanks out what the revision itself labels an “unsafe storage-value refund,” and drops in a check against the “execution-gas budget” — described in the commit as a guard against re-entrancy or gas-manipulation exploits cascading into transaction-integrity failures. Both edits sit inside authorization-handling gas accounting. If the proposal is activated, the commit’s accounting would raise the minimum cost for authorization-heavy transactions.

The commit presents the changes as proactive safeguards intended to prevent re-entrancy and gas-manipulation failures from compromising transaction integrity.

The GitHub commit lists TX_MAX_GAS_LIMIT at 16,777,216. It gives the combined floor per authorization as 10,176 gas and the PER_EMPTY_ACCOUNT_COST intrinsic as 25,000 gas. That intrinsic is 4,000 gas above a bare ETH$2,472.10▲2.66% transfer’s 21,000 gas, or about 19.05% more; the authorization floor and intrinsic are separate components, and actual totals depend on transaction composition.

The commit also includes a May 2026 Mainnet sample examining how EIP-8279 interacts with EIP-8131. Run EIP-8131 alone and 3.24% of transactions paid more gas, aggregate gas up 3.29%. Stack EIP-8279 on top: 3.79% of transactions paying more, 4.06% aggregate gas increase. The combined figure is 0.55 percentage points above the EIP-8131-only figure (3.79% – 3.24%), while the commit attributes 0.54 points to EIP-8279, a 0.01-point rounding discrepancy. The 0.77-percentage-point gas attribution holds cleanly; 4.06% minus 3.29% checks out.

What the commit doesn’t say is whether EIP-8279 has cleared any formal fork-activation decision; the fact sheet does not establish a formal fork decision. The changes exist in the repository.

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