Ethereum developers have called off Glamsterdam’s activation on the Hoodi testnet, four days before the upgrade was due to go live there. The decision leaves the network’s next hard fork without its final public test date, and with it the trigger for picking a mainnet date.
Christine D. Kim, founder of research and advisory firm Protocol Watch, said in a post on X on Oct. 22 that the cancellation was “due to security issues found in” Glamsterdam by the security firm ChainSecurity.
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Gas Accounting Concerns
ChainSecurity’s Oct. 13 analysis focused on EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, two Glamsterdam proposals that change how Ethereum charges gas for creating and accessing state. The firm warned that code handling a failed call could behave differently after the upgrade even if no one edits it. “Even with unchanged contract code, a failure path that previously reverted can now complete,” it wrote, adding that continuing in that situation “can turn a retryable operation into a permanent failure.”
A day before the Oct. 22 All Core Devs Execution call, security researcher pcaversaccio asked developers on GitHub to discuss the findings, writing that “these findings call for a reassessment of this hard fork” while noting the decision was not his to make.
What Node Operators Need to Do
Kim’s message to operators, posted on X minutes before her post on the cause, gave them two choices: “revert to an older release without the Hoodi upgrade scheduled,” or hold off until their execution-layer client publishes an update that drops it.
Besu developers merged a pull request titled “Unschedule Amsterdam on Hoodi” on Oct. 22, but merging code does not update nodes already running the old build. The PR states that Hoodi nodes on Besu 26.10.0 “still activate Amsterdam at that timestamp until they run a release with this change.”
On the network’s side, Barnabas Busa, who works on DevOps at the Ethereum Foundation, unscheduled the fork in Hoodi’s shared configuration files. That took out the Amsterdam start time set for Oct. 26, the Gloas fork at epoch 132,352 and a scheduled jump in Hoodi’s gas limit to 200 million at that epoch, returning the files to how they looked before the fork was scheduled.
December Candidates Hinged on Hoodi
The agenda for the Oct. 22 call listed Dec. 1, Dec. 8 and Dec. 9 as candidate mainnet dates, with a plan to pick one on the following week’s consensus-layer call “if Hoodi goes smoothly.”
Glamsterdam, which would move proposer-builder separation into the protocol (EIP-7732) and add block-level access lists (EIP-7928), went live on the Sepolia testnet on Oct. 6. The Ethereum Foundation announced the Hoodi schedule on Oct. 16.
Neither Busa’s rollback nor Kim’s posts named a new date for the Hoodi test.
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