Research showing that two of the gas changes at Glamsterdam could alter the behavior of deployed contracts has pulled the Hoodi fork from the upgrade, with no new date set.
Thursday October 22, the main developers of Ethereum postponed Activation of Glamsterdam on the Hoodi testnet, four days before its launch on Monday October 26.
There is no new date yet, and the culprit is not a client bug but rather two gas changes that could alter the behavior of some already deployed contracts.
-
The trigger: On October 13, security company ChainSecurity published research showing that two of the upgrade’s gas repricing proposals, EIP-8037 (state creation) and EIP-8038 (state access), can allow a contract’s failure path to end where it was returning, without any code changes. In one example, writing to a new storage location can cost 110,020 gas, up from 22,100 today, enough to blow out gas budgets hardcoded in old contracts. The EF says developers need time to study how EIP-8037 interacts with mainnet contracts.
Do you like this article?
Subscribe to Bankless or log in
-
Risk at the application layer: The main danger is the “insufficient gas problem”, where a caller intentionally sends too little gas, so that a legitimate action is recorded as a permanent failure, potentially blocking further attempts or destroying claims. ChainSecurity said the that he has already found 13 real cases and is privately informing the projects concerned.
-
What changes: Hoodi loses its planned activations for Amsterdam (execution layer) and Gloas (consensus layer), as well as an increase in the gas limit to 200M. The Hoodi node and validator executors must update or restore both clients by Monday; mainnet users and ETH holders do not need to do anything.
-
Mainnet Schedule: Glamsterdam, characterized by proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists, still has no mainnet date, and Nixo wait the delay “most likely pushes Glamsterdam on the Ethereum mainnet until 2027.” Any spec changes would also mean new client releases, a new Hoodi date, and potentially a second fork for Sepolia, which was already upgraded on October 6.
William M. Peaster
1084 messages
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, gaming, and other cultural applications. He has a background in creative writing and writes fiction in his spare time.
About the Author
