Ethereum developers have postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi test network while they investigate how proposed gas-accounting changes interact with existing smart contracts.
The Ethereum Foundation’s announcement removes the October 26 activation and says a replacement date has not been set. The decision followed the latest execution-layer developers’ meeting and concerns EIP-8037 compatibility.
The change also withdraws the gas-limit schedule that would have raised Hoodi’s limit to 200 million at the activation point. It does not reverse the test network’s transaction history or announce a new mainnet deployment date.
A test schedule is paused, not Ethereum itself
Hoodi is a testing environment. Ethereum’s documentation distinguishes test networks, where developers and operators can exercise software and applications, from mainnet, where transactions carry real economic consequences.
That separation is particularly important when an upgrade changes execution costs. An application may depend on how much work a call can complete and what happens when it runs out of gas. Testing needs to establish that the changed rules behave as intended across those interactions.
A compatibility concern is not automatically evidence that an attacker has exploited a deployed contract. It can instead identify a reason to stop a planned change before the network is asked to enforce it.
For users, the practical distinction is between a service currently operating under existing rules and a proposed set of rules still undergoing testing. Postponing the latter does not mean the former has stopped processing transactions.
Operators need the revised configuration
The foundation tells Hoodi operators to check both execution and consensus clients for instructions that explicitly remove the old activation. The earlier announcement’s release list is not sufficient evidence that a particular version incorporates the postponement.
That is an operational requirement for participants in the test network. A machine running an obsolete schedule could begin expecting different rules from its peers when the cancelled activation time arrives.
Client version numbers alone also need context. Operators need to know which network a release configures and which scheduled changes it includes, rather than assume that a generally recent download necessarily contains every subsequent configuration correction.
Mainnet timing remains a separate decision
Our earlier report covered Glamsterdam preparations on Sepolia. A successful test, a scheduled later test and approval to deploy on mainnet are separate milestones; one does not establish that all the others have been completed.
The foundation says mainnet users and ETH holders do not need to take action because of this Hoodi update. A revised testing schedule will be announced separately.
The next useful evidence will therefore be a replacement activation plan and the software instructions supporting it. Until then, the relevant news is that developers have removed a scheduled test while examining compatibility, rather than committing the production network to an uncertain date.