According to Woofun AI, the Ethereum community officially submitted a draft EIP-8488 proposal specification in an attempt to reconstruct the underlying gas pricing logic using a versioned V2 opcode and establish a dual-track execution environment for old and new contracts. The purpose of this move is to avoid the risk of existing smart contracts collapsing due to abrupt rule changes, and at the same time remove architectural barriers to curbing state expansion and raising the entire network's gas limit.
After the Ethereum Foundation's technical announcement revealed that the eight major contracts were at risk of being broken, the ecosystem fell into a dilemma: directly implementing the EIP-8037 proposal specification and the EIP-8038 proposal specification would disrupt the existing application of hardcoded gas logic, while shelving price increases caused the situation to explode. As the Ethereum Core Developers Conference (ACD) has postponed the Hoodi testnet hard fork, the community is in urgent need of a buffer solution. EIP-8488 adopts an old and new cutoff strategy, and the old contract deployed before activation will permanently continue to use the existing billing system.
According to data compiled by Woofun AI, the new deployment contract is forced to use a V2 operation code and write a version tag, and cross-contract calls require both parties to belong to the same V2 version; otherwise, execution fails. In order to prevent dynamic system overhead from being written down in the business code, the V2 operation code set completely removes GAS and GASLIMIT instructions, removes the contract's ability to introspect the remaining gas, and cuts off the rigid coupling between application layer logic and underlying pricing.
This two-track parallel mechanism does not force high-risk code refactorings on historical assets. Decentralized finance protocols with an upgradable proxy architecture can be smoothly replaced by V2 implementation in subsequent iterations, while the original unchangeable contract remains asleep or operates under the original rules. As business traffic migrates to a new version of the contract that is bound by state, the pressure on nodes to expand the disorderly state will be substantially mitigated. When the V2 execution ratio reaches the security threshold and the storage growth rate is controlled, the core developers have the technical ambition to drastically raise the single gas limit for the entire network. The proposal is currently in draft status and is included in this week's Ethereum Core Developer Executive Meeting (ACDE) agenda for peer review.