Ethereum’s core developers have postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on Hoodi, the test network where it was due to go live on Monday, 26 Oct, at 17:42:48 UTC. They want more time to study how EIP-8037, which reprices the gas cost of creating new state, interacts with smart contracts already on mainnet, the Ethereum Foundation said on Thursday. No new date has been set.

The decision came on Thursday’s execution-layer developer call, ACDE #248, less than two weeks after the Hoodi date set on 9 Oct.

The rundown

  • What changed: The 26 Oct activation of both halves of the upgrade, Amsterdam on the execution layer and Gloas on the consensus layer, is off, and so is the step that would have raised Hoodi’s gas limit to 200 million at the same epoch. Hoodi’s chain history is not rolled back. Node and validator operators need execution and consensus clients that drop the old schedule before Monday; so far the Foundation lists Lodestar v1.50.1 and Besu 26.10.1.
  • Why it matters: Gas is the fee unit for computation on Ethereum, and some contracts lean on it as a safety rail: if a call runs out of gas, it reverts. Audit firm ChainSecurity wrote on 13 Oct that the new gas accounting, with its refills and separate reservoir for state gas, can let failure handlers finish where they used to revert, which undermines those out-of-gas checks. On the call, ChainSecurity’s findings covered at least 13 major DeFi projects with affected contracts, a list that is not exhaustive, and disclosure to them is under way, EtherWorld’s call notes say.
  • Where it breaks: The fix is not just a code change in clients. Contracts that already sit on mainnet cannot easily be rewritten, so developers have to decide whether to change the EIP, the contracts or the schedule. That makes the timeline open-ended. The December mainnet window discussed earlier is now considered “highly unlikely”, and developers acknowledged the upgrade may not reach mainnet until 2027, according to EtherWorld’s summary of the call. And any Hoodi operator still running the old configuration on Monday risks splitting from the network.
  • By the numbers: Under EIP-8037, ChainSecurity puts a cold write to a fresh storage slot at 12,100 execution gas plus 97,920 state gas, against 22,100 under Osaka, today’s ruleset. That is about five times the cost of the same write.

Nothing changes for people who simply hold or use ether. The Foundation says “no action is required from Ethereum mainnet users or ETH holders”, and the delay does not set or move a mainnet date because none had been set. Researchers and client teams are expected to bring a fuller impact analysis to the next testing call, ACDT, according to EtherWorld.

Ethereum’s longer-range work carries on in parallel, from EIP-8453, the plan to cut finality time to staking products such as Interactive Brokers’ ether staking launch, which are unaffected.

Official notice: Glamsterdam on Hoodi Postponed (Ethereum Foundation)

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.