Ethereum postpones Hoodi Glamsterdam test over contract-interaction concerns

Ethereum core developers have postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet, withdrawing an October 26 activation while they investigate interactions between proposed state-gas accounting and existing smart contracts.

The Ethereum Foundation announced the reversal on October 22. Its notice supersedes the earlier testnet schedule and says no replacement activation date has been set. The change matters for developers and infrastructure operators preparing to test the next Ethereum upgrade, but it neither alters Ethereum mainnet nor establishes that a production contract has been exploited.

The testnet schedule was removed

The superseded plan called for Hoodi to activate Amsterdam on the execution layer and Gloas on the consensus layer at 17:42:48 UTC on October 26, corresponding to epoch 132,352. Hoodi’s gas limit was also scheduled to rise to 200 million gas at that epoch.

The Foundation says all three scheduled changes have been removed from Hoodi’s configuration. That is a cancellation of a future testnet fork, not a rollback of Hoodi’s existing chain history. No action is required from ordinary Ethereum mainnet users or ETH holders because the announcement applies only to the test network.

Client teams began shipping replacement software after the decision. The go-ethereum project released Geth version 1.17.10 on October 23 and instructed Hoodi operators using version 1.17.9 to upgrade before the former activation time. Its release record confirms that Amsterdam was unscheduled on Hoodi while other networks remain unaffected. The Foundation’s release table also lists updated versions from several execution- and consensus-layer clients, although operators still need to follow the instructions for the specific client and validator tooling they run.

Why developers stopped the clock

The postponement followed the October 22 All Core Developers Execution meeting, whose public agenda recorded concerns involving EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The Foundation identified further investigation of EIP-8037’s interactions with mainnet smart contracts as the reason for the delay.

EIP-8037 proposes separating state-creation gas from execution gas. Its purpose is to constrain growth of Ethereum’s stored state while allowing greater execution throughput. Under the proposal, state-creation charges can draw from a separate reservoir, and gas can be restored when the associated state creation is undone.

That design changes assumptions some applications may make about how much usable gas remains after an internal call fails. ChainSecurity’s published analysis describes cases in which restored state gas or a reverting intermediary could leave a caller with more execution capacity than a contract’s existing failure-handling logic anticipated. The analysis does not establish that every gas check is unsafe or that a mainnet exploit has occurred; it identifies contract patterns that require further testing under the proposed rules.

What remains unresolved

Glamsterdam is still a proposed Ethereum upgrade, and Hoodi is a testing venue rather than mainnet. The delay therefore represents the test process catching a compatibility question before the scheduled activation, not a reversal of deployed mainnet rules.

Developers have not announced a new Hoodi epoch, timestamp or mainnet date. The exact treatment of EIP-8037 may also change during review: its specification remained in Last Call when checked on October 23. The next verifiable milestones are an updated proposal, a replacement testnet schedule and client releases explicitly incorporating that schedule. Until those records appear, the former October 26 activation should be treated as withdrawn rather than merely delayed by a fixed interval.