Ethereum Pulls Glamsterdam Off Hoodi Four Days Before the Fork

Ethereum's next upgrade will not reach its second public rehearsal on Monday. Developers took Glamsterdam off the Hoodi test network's schedule on 22 October, four days before it was due, after an auditor reported that two gas-pricing proposals inside it change how already-deployed contracts behave when a call fails. No replacement date has been set. The cancellation also drops a planned increase of Hoodi's block gas limit to 200 million. Mainnet never had a date, and the December slots developers had been weighing now sit behind an open investigation.

What the two proposals change

The two are EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The first adds separate accounting for the gas a transaction spends creating new blockchain state, and raises what that costs; the second changes the price of reading and modifying state that already exists. Decrypt treats the pair as one change to what the network charges for creating and accessing stored data. The Crypto Times divides the work, giving the separate gas reservoir to 8037 and the access repricing to 8038. Cryptonews names only EIP-8037 and hangs the whole concern on it. None of the three descriptions contradicts the others. All three are secondhand, and no account read here quotes the text of either proposal.

Thirteen examples, and nobody will say which

The auditor is ChainSecurity, which published a technical assessment on 13 October by crypto.news's account and posted again on Thursday. Its finding concerns contracts that read how much gas is left to decide whether a failed external call can be retried or has to be written down as permanent. Under the new rules an unwound state-creating operation can hand gas back, so a failure handler runs to completion where the transaction would once have reverted. A sound operation can then be recorded as having failed for good. Decrypt names the class of attack: insufficient gas griefing, where somebody supplies too little gas on purpose so that a valid operation fails. Nothing in an exposed contract has to change for the exposure to be there.

"We already found 13 real-world examples," ChainSecurity wrote.

Three of the five accounts read here carry that line. Cryptonews gives no count. The projects behind the thirteen examples are not named, and the firm said it was working through responsible disclosure with them. Decrypt reports the Ethereum Foundation still establishing how many contracts in total are affected, a figure that turns up nowhere else and that nobody has put a range on.

The instructions node operators got

Who made the call is described two ways. Three accounts credit the Ethereum Foundation, announcing on 22 October after the All Core Developers Execution meeting. Decrypt instead quotes ChainSecurity's own post, which said it had just been decided to delay the fork because of security impacts the firm had identified. Both describe one decision and nothing read here settles which came first. Operators of Hoodi nodes were told to run client versions that explicitly confirm the activation set for 26 October has been removed. crypto.news lists four such releases, Lodestar, Besu, Nethermind and an Ethrex release candidate, and it is the only account that lists any. A Prysm release was due the same day, by Decrypt's reading. Mainnet users and holders were told to do nothing.

December was never fixed

Developers had three possible mainnet dates in front of them before this, 1, 8 and 9 December, and had agreed on none; crypto.news is alone on the specific days. Cryptonews says only that December came up and should not be read as settled. CCN calls the window uncertain and points out that nobody has formally withdrawn it. Decrypt puts the original ambition at shipping to mainnet before the end of 2026, with the following fork, Hegota, in 2027. The first rehearsal did go ahead: Glamsterdam activated on Sepolia on 6 October with the higher gas limit, and Thursday's decision leaves that alone. What is missing now is a second rehearsal and a number for how many contracts are exposed. Neither exists yet, so there is no schedule left to miss.