Ethereum Draft EIP-8487 Splits Gas Into Two Separate Counters

A new draft Ethereum Improvement Proposal would split the gas a transaction consumes into two separate counters rather than one, opening a path to repricing individual opcodes without changing how existing contracts behave on-chain. The proposal, posted for discussion on the Ethereum Magicians forum on November 9, 2026, is titled "EIP-8487: Separate execution credits and billing credits" and links to the underlying pull request on the ethereum/EIPs GitHub repository, authored by a contributor using the handle Giulio2002.

How execution credits and billing split from each other

Per the forum post, the proposal introduces two counters that are both initialized from a transaction's gas limit, but that behave differently from that point onward. The first counter, called "credits," follows the legacy gas schedule used by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) today. Credits are the only gas figure the EVM itself observes — governing the GAS opcode, call forwarding between contracts, and contract creation costs.

The second counter, "billing," follows a new, separately adjustable schedule and determines the actual transaction fee a user pays. According to the forum post, if billing runs out before execution finishes, the entire transaction aborts in an uncatchable manner — even if credits remain available to continue execution. The stated goal, per the proposal text, is to let Ethereum core developers reprice individual opcodes for network cost or security reasons without altering the execution-level behavior that existing smart contracts depend on today.

This matters because gas repricing has historically been a blunt instrument. When an opcode's real-world cost changes — for instance if a storage-access pattern becomes more expensive to process for node operators — developers have had to adjust the single gas figure that both execution logic and fee calculation share. That single change can alter how contracts that hard-code gas assumptions behave, occasionally breaking them. Separating the counter contracts see from the counter that determines payment is meant to decouple those two concerns.

What a two-counter gas model changes for developers

If adopted, the split would give Ethereum's core developers more room to adjust fee schedules in response to network conditions without the same risk of breaking contracts that rely on precise gas accounting, since the EVM-facing "credits" figure would remain governed by the legacy schedule. The proposal is a draft under discussion on Ethereum Magicians as of November 9, 2026, and has not been assigned to a hard fork or scheduled for inclusion in any Ethereum network upgrade. Readers tracking Ethereum's protocol development should watch the Ethereum Magicians thread and the associated GitHub pull request for core developer feedback, since EIPs at this stage routinely go through multiple rounds of review, specification changes, or rejection before any inclusion decision is made.