Key Takeaways
- Ethereum postponed Glamsterdam’s October 26 Hoodi testnet upgrade, with no replacement date announced.
- EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 could disrupt existing contracts’ gas assumptions, potentially making failed operations permanent or causing valid calls to fail.
- The tentative December mainnet window is uncertain, pending further investigation and testing.
Ethereum developers have postponed a key test of the Glamsterdam upgrade after security researchers identified changes that could disrupt how existing smart contracts handle failed operations.
The Hoodi testnet activation, scheduled for Oct. 26, has been canceled without a replacement date.
The Ethereum Foundation confirmed the decision on Oct. 22, saying developers need more time to investigate interactions between EIP-8037 and contracts already deployed on mainnet.
The pause puts the proposed early-December mainnet window under pressure. That timing remained tentative, with developers expecting to settle the schedule after successful Hoodi testing.
Why Ethereum Developers Paused the Upgrade
The immediate concern involves Ethereum’s gas accounting, the system that measures and charges for computational work and storage.
EIP-8037 would increase the cost of creating blockchain state while introducing separate accounting for those charges. Its purpose is to prevent Ethereum’s database from growing too quickly as higher gas limits allow the network to process more activity.
A companion proposal, EIP-8038, updates charges for accessing and modifying existing state. It aims to align those costs with the resources required as Ethereum’s database expands.
The difficulty is compatibility. Contracts written for today’s gas rules can make assumptions that no longer hold under the proposed system, even when their code remains unchanged.
The postponement covers both components of Glamsterdam: the Amsterdam execution-layer upgrade and the Gloas consensus-layer upgrade.
Developers also removed Hoodi’s planned increase to a 200 million gas limit. The change revises the upcoming activation configuration; it does not reverse the testnet’s transaction history.
How Failed Operations Could Become Permanent
ChainSecurity’s analysis describes risks involving “insufficient gas griefing,” where a malicious caller supplies too little gas for an otherwise valid operation.
Some contracts catch failed calls and continue running. They might record an unsuccessful attempt, remove a claim or disable retries.
Safeguards can depend on detecting insufficient remaining gas or on the failure handler itself running out of gas, reversing the transaction.
Glamsterdam could change that behavior. Under certain conditions, undoing state creation restores gas during execution. That can leave enough resources to complete a failure-handling routine that previously would have reverted.
The result could be an operation incorrectly recorded as permanently failed, despite being valid if supplied with sufficient gas.
The risk also runs in the opposite direction. ChainSecurity calculated that a new storage-slot write could require 110,020 execution gas when the separate state-gas allowance cannot cover it, compared with 22,100 previously. An unchanged gas budget could therefore become inadequate.
The firm stressed that some protections remain effective, but developers must reassess their assumptions and preserve recovery paths.
What the Delay Means for December
Glamsterdam already activated on Sepolia on Oct. 6. Hoodi was the next public deployment, intended to test changes supporting greater Ethereum throughput.
The upgrade includes enshrined proposer-builder separation, which brings coordination between block proposers and builders into the protocol.
Another feature, block-level access lists, helps clients process state access and validation more efficiently.
These changes support Ethereum’s scaling plans, making compatibility testing a consequential step before mainnet deployment.
For Hoodi node and validator operators, the immediate requirement is to follow updated client instructions removing the October 26 activation.
Mainnet users and ETH holders need take no action because of this announcement.
December has not been formally canceled. However, with the next rehearsal unscheduled and contract compatibility still under review, the remaining time for testing, fixes and coordinated deployment is narrowing.
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Giuseppe Ciccomascolo began his career as an investigative journalist in Italy, where he contributed to both local and national newspapers, focusing on various financial sectors.
Upon relocating to London, he worked as an analyst for Fitch's CapitalStructure and later as a Senior Reporter for Alliance News. In 2017, Giuseppe transitioned to covering cryptocurrency-related news, producing documentaries and articles on Bitcoin and other emerging digital currencies. He also played a pivotal role in establishing the academy for a cryptocurrency exchange website. Crypto remained his primary area of interest throughout his tenure as a writer for ThirdFloor.
