Former Ethereum Core Dev Greg Markou Defends Developers Over Stalled Gas Repricing

Greg Markou, a former Ethereum core developer, defended the engineers who build Ethereum’s protocol as Glamsterdam, its next upgrade, sits on hold over a planned gas repricing. Gas is the fee Ethereum charges for computation and storage.

Markou said on the Nov. 11 episode of Unchained’s Uneasy Money that developers “bundle 30 EIPs into a giant hard fork,” and that “one of them’s gonna break” when they do. An Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) is a formal spec for a network change, and a hard fork is the coordinated upgrade that ships a batch of them.

Two Glamsterdam proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, reprice some operations and stored data. Developers called off an Oct. 26 launch on the Hoodi test network, and the Ethereum Foundation (EF) said on Nov. 9 that it had four reports of deployed contracts that could break, as Unchained reported.

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‘Monolithic Beast’

Markou gave updates for Lodestar, ChainSafe’s software for running Ethereum’s proof-of-stake chain, on the network’s core-developer calls in 2019, according to the calls’ notes. Of the current core developers, he said “it’s a misnomer to think that they don’t care” about apps. He called Ethereum “an absolute, like, monolithic beast” and said past gas repricings have “broken so many times.”

“I broke web3.js when I was maintaining it years ago and bricked like every app post 1559,” he said. The web3.js library is code apps use to talk to Ethereum; ChainSafe, which Markou co-founded, received an EF grant in 2020 to maintain it. EIP-1559, a fee-market overhaul, went live in August 2021.

Proposals Pile Up

Markou said the flow of incoming proposals, which he put at about 10 a day, has grown with artificial intelligence (AI) tools: “it’s, like, increased with AI. It’s, like, really bad.” By Unchained’s count, 251 pull requests, proposed changes submitted on GitHub, the code-hosting site, including edits to existing proposals, were opened in the 30 days to Nov. 10 across Ethereum’s EIP repository and its one for Ethereum Request for Comments (ERC) app standards. That is about eight a day, more than double 2024’s 100 in the same stretch but below 2025’s 316.

App teams should test against a coming fork with their own AI tools, he said, and if the answer is “based on this hard fork, we would be screwed,” then “report it.” On the public fights over upgrades, he said “it’s always gonna look this messy” because outrage that draws engagement online is “good for business.”

The EF’s schedule has outside auditors ChainSecurity and Dedaub delivering reports Nov. 13, though the agenda for a Nov. 16 developer testing call expects audits to finish Nov. 16 to 19. A Nov. 19 call will discuss findings, with no decision committed in advance, the EF said.

AI-assisted content: This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and was reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a member of the Unchained editorial team before publication.