Ethereum core developers have decided to postpone the activation of the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet. This decision was made after it was determined that the new gas calculation rules could disrupt the execution logic of already deployed smart contracts, potentially causing certain failed transactions to be irreversibly recorded on the blockchain.
An emergency stop in Ethereum's testing schedule
The Ethereum technical team agreed Cancel the activation of Glamsterdam on the Hoodi network during the last developer implementation meeting. The date originally set for this milestone was October 26 at 17:42:48 UTC, but the rollout has been halted with no new confirmed timeline for its reactivation or its eventual arrival on the main network.
This step back is in response to a technical warning concerning the network's backward compatibility. Although Glamsterdam completed its preliminary phase on the Sepolia network on October 6, the move to Hoodi represented a large-scale trial. The intention was to assess the system's behavior with an expanded limit of 200 million gas per block, a substantially higher threshold that required extreme caution before stressing the decentralized infrastructure.
The development community prioritizes stability over deadlines. In an ecosystem where thousands of decentralized finance protocols and autonomous applications operate, any modification to the virtual machine must ensure that software programs created years ago continue to function under the exact same security assumptions.
The impact of proposals EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 on gas
The core of the technical controversy lies in the combination of two specific improvement proposals: EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The first of these seeks to restructure the costs associated with creating new records in the Ethereum database, with the aim of containing the excessive growth of the network state as the total processing volume increases and the overall capacity of the chain is scaled.
However, a security report published on October 13th warned of unforeseen side effects. By altering how run fuel is reimbursed and calculated when an internal call fails, the system can leave contracts with a different amount of remaining gas than projected by their original creators. This substantially changes how applications handle internal operational exceptions.
There are contracts specifically designed to capture subroutine failures and make programmed decisions based on whether the computation balance has been exhausted. If the protocol returns gas units that were previously consumed entirely, the contract has leeway to execute subsequent instructions that should have been rolled back, consolidating inconsistent states or recording permanent errors in the system's storage.
Deviations in storage and execution costs
The technical analysis detailed that the problem also manifests itself in the opposite direction, unexpectedly increasing the cost of routine operations. For example, creating a new storage slot can require up to 110.020 units of gas under the proposed rules when a secondary allocation is exhausted, compared to the usual base cost of 22.100 units in the previous architecture.
This sudden increase can cause perfectly legitimate transactions to fail due to insufficient gas budget. Many smart contracts establish strict consumption limits when interacting with other modules to protect against re-entry attacks or malicious consumption. When faced with a five-fold increase in the memory allocation fee, scheduled operations are abruptly interrupted.
To understand in depth the mechanics of these fees and the logic of the contract ecosystem, you can consult the training resources of Bit2Me Academywhere the architecture of the Ethereum virtual machine is analyzed. Maintaining these balances is essential so that the user does not suffer losses due to truncated executions or disproportionate fees when interacting with production applications.
Glamsterdam's objectives beyond gas calculations
Despite this setback on the testnet, the Glamsterdam upgrade introduces significant changes aimed at modernizing Ethereum's blockchain infrastructure. Among its most notable components is a complete overhaul of the block builder selection mechanism, designed to mitigate the adverse effects of maximum value mining by validators and democratize technical participation.
The goal of enabling blocks with a consumption of up to 200 million gas units remains part of the medium-term roadmap. This capacity would multiply the volume of complex transfers and calls per second that the first layer can directly handle, indirectly lowering rates during peak congestion and optimizing settlement for second-layer solutions.
The postponement demonstrates that Ethereum's technical governance process maintains rigorous filters. Those who decide buy Ethereum To build their portfolio, they closely follow these engineering decisions, as the reliability of the execution rules is the cornerstone that sustains the network's value in international markets and its regulated institutional adoption.
FAQ
What specific problem caused the update to be suspended?
Researchers discovered that the gas rules in proposals EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 altered contract behavior in the event of failures. This allowed certain erroneous transactions to remain permanently stored and not be reversed, or for valid transactions to fail by requiring up to 110.020 gas units per slot, compared to the usual 22.100.
Does this vulnerability affect user funds on the main network?
No, funds on the main network are not at risk because the change had only been implemented in closed test environments like Sepolia and had not yet been applied to the live network. The vulnerability was identified before the phase was activated on Hoodi, preventing any harm to the operational ecosystem.
When will Glamsterdam be fully implemented?
At the moment, no alternative date has been set for either the Hoodi test network or the mainline deployment. Developers will coordinate new timelines at upcoming technical meetings after correcting the gas models to ensure compatibility with existing code.
The precautionary suspension of Glamsterdam on the Hoodi network underscores the inherent complexity of upgrading a decentralized network in production without jeopardizing billions in operational applications. The early identification of these anomalies in the gas tariff system reinforces the importance of subjecting every proposal to thorough audits before altering the consensus layer.
As security teams and developers fine-tune the specifications of the EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 proposals, the ecosystem will have a more predictable framework for scaling its transactional capacity without jeopardizing the historical logic of its smart contracts.
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