Research showing two of Glamsterdam’s gas changes could alter how deployed contracts behave has pulled the upgrade’s Hoodi fork, with no new date set.
On Thursday (Oct. 22nd), Ethereum core developers postponed Glamsterdam’s activation on the Hoodi testnet, four days before it was set to go live on Monday (Oct. 26th).
There’s no new date yet, and the culprit isn’t a client bug but rather two gas changes that could alter how some already-deployed contracts behave.
What’s the Scoop?
The trigger: On Oct. 13th, security firm ChainSecurity published research showing that two of the upgrade’s gas-repricing proposals, EIP-8037 (state creation) and EIP-8038 (state access), can let a contract’s failure path complete where it used to revert, without any code change. In one example, writing to a fresh storage slot can cost 110,020 gas, versus 22,100 today, enough to bust gas budgets hardcoded into older contracts. The EF says devs need time to study how EIP-8037 interacts with mainnet contracts.
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The app-layer risk: The main danger is “insufficient gas griefing,” where a caller purposely sends too little gas so a legitimate action gets logged as a permanent failure, potentially blocking retries or wiping out claims. ChainSecurity said on X that it has already found 13 real-world cases and is privately notifying the affected projects.
What changes: Hoodi loses its planned Amsterdam (execution layer) and Gloas (consensus layer) activations, plus a gas-limit bump to 200M. Hoodi node and validator runners must update or roll back both clients before Monday; mainnet users and ETH holders have nothing to do.
Mainnet timing: Glamsterdam, headlined by enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists, still has no mainnet date, and Nixo expects the delay “more than likely pushes glamsterdam on ethereum mainnet into 2027.” Any spec change would also mean fresh client releases, a new Hoodi date, and potentially a second fork for Sepolia, which already upgraded on Oct. 6th.
William M. Peaster
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William M. Peaster, Senior Writer, has been with Bankless since January 2021. Immersed in Ethereum since 2017, he covers the onchain frontier with a particular interest in art, games, and other culture apps. He has a background in creative writing and writes fiction in his free time.