Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade had been scheduled to go live on the Hoodi test network on Monday, Oct. 26 at 17:42:48 UTC. That activation is now off, and developers haven’t picked a replacement date.
The decision came during Thursday’s All Core Devs Execution meeting. Security researchers had found that a proposed change to Ethereum’s gas accounting could affect how smart contracts already on the network deal with failed transactions, and in some cases errors could become permanent.
A single gas change is behind the delay
The proposal in question is EIP-8037. It changes what Ethereum charges to create new records in its database. The aim is to keep that database from growing too fast as the network increases how many transactions it can handle.
Security firm ChainSecurity published an analysis on Oct. 13. It showed that EIP-8037, together with EIP-8038, could change the way a contract responds when another contract it calls runs out of gas. Gas is the fee paid to the network’s operators.
Developers want to study how this change affects contracts that are already live on mainnet, since those contracts were written under the old rules.
How a failure could stick
Some contracts are designed to catch a failed operation and carry on. A contract might record that an attempt failed, stop any more attempts, or move on to a different step.
Developers sometimes rely on the remaining gas being too low for those follow-up steps to complete. Once the gas is gone, the entire transaction is reversed and nothing is recorded.
Glamsterdam changes that calculation. Under the proposed rules, gas used to create certain records can be refunded when those changes are rolled back. That refund may leave a contract with enough gas to finish a failure-handling step that previously would have reversed. A failure that once disappeared could end up on the record.
The risk also cuts the other way
By ChainSecurity’s calculation, creating a new storage slot could cost 110,020 gas after a separate allowance runs out. The same operation costs 22,100 gas under the current rules.
That means a contract operating on a fixed gas budget could fail midway through an operation that is otherwise valid.
The findings have limits. ChainSecurity showed how the mechanisms work, but it hasn’t publicly demonstrated that any major production protocol can be exploited. Its research describes how existing software would behave under the proposed rules. It doesn’t suggest any contract is being exploited through these changes today.
What happens to the rollout now
The gas rules are only part of Glamsterdam. The upgrade also brings a new system for selecting block builders and changes intended to help the network process larger blocks.
Glamsterdam went live on the Sepolia testnet on Oct. 6. Hoodi was meant to be the next public rehearsal, paired with a rise in Hoodi’s gas limit to 200 million. That increase has been paused as well.
Ethereum mainnet still has no confirmed date for Glamsterdam. Anyone maintaining a contract that relies on running out of gas to force a revert should read ChainSecurity’s Oct. 13 analysis before Hoodi is given a new date.