Ethereum has spent a decade without the standard transfer receipts used by most tokens, but Glamsterdam seems to be finally changing that.
- Among the less flashy changes activated on Sepolia this week is EIP-7708, which requires non-zero ETH transfers to generate standardized logs.
- The Coinformer found the change buried among Glamsterdam's much bigger scaling and validator upgrades, even though it fixes a quirk that has followed Ethereum since its early days.
The problem was that native ETH didn't behave like ERC-20 tokens, which normally emit a standard [transfer] event whenever they move.
ETH sent from inside smart contracts could instead require transaction tracing or other infrastructure before an exchange, wallet or explorer could reliably spot it.
Ethereum's own proposal says that has caused practical problems over the years, including exchanges failing to recognize some deposits sent from smart contract wallets or taking longer to credit them because the transfer wasn't exposed through the same simple logs used for tokens.
ETH finally starts behaving more like a token
EIP-7708 changes that by making ETH movements during contract execution emit the familiar [transfer(address, address, uint256)] event used across the token ecosystem.
That could make things much simpler for exchanges, wallets, bridges and block explorers, which would no longer need to rely as heavily on custom tracing systems just to figure out where native ETH moved during a contract call.
The change doesn't expose anything that was previously private. Those transfers were already visible on-chain. The issue was that finding them wasn't always straightforward, especially when ETH moved several layers deep inside smart contract execution.
- The Ethereum Foundation has described the missing logs as a historical blind spot and the fix is arriving more than a decade after Ethereum launched in 2015.
- Vitalik Buterin and other developers first proposed EIP-7708 in 2024, but Glamsterdam is the point where it's finally moving through a live public testnet.
Other old quirks are getting cleaned up too
Glamsterdam also includes EIP-7997, which could make smart contract wallets less confusing across chains by standardizing a deployment factory that lets the same contract address be reproduced on different EVM networks.
Standard Ethereum wallets can already use the same address across EVM chains, but smart contract wallets don't always have that convenience. Developers behind the proposal argue that the mismatch can confuse users and, in some cases, contribute to funds being sent to the wrong place.
- Another quieter change fixes an odd validator loophole.
- Ethereum can currently punish a validator for breaking consensus rules but still randomly choose that same validator to produce a block before it fully exits, even though any block it makes will be rejected.
- EIP-8045 removes slashed validators from that lottery, which matters most after a large slashing event when otherwise many block slots could go unused.
Those fixes are arriving alongside the parts of Glamsterdam getting most of the attention, including enshrined proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists and changes meant to let Ethereum handle much larger blocks.
Sepolia is only the first stop
Glamsterdam activated on testnet Sepolia on Oct. 6, with developers also testing a gas limit above 200 million, more than three times the previous level used by clients.
Still, if EIP-7708 makes it through, one of Ethereum's strangest old inconsistencies could finally disappear and ETH itself would become easier to track using the same basic machinery that Ethereum's token ecosystem has relied on for years.