Ethereum Pulls Glamsterdam Test

CoinDesk reported that developers halted the test during an All Core Devs Execution meeting after reviewing how two proposed changes, known as EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, might interact with software already running on the network. The upgrade had been due to activate on Hoodi on Oct. 26 at 17:42:48 UTC.

The problem sits in the dull but consequential corner of protocol design: gas accounting. ChainSecurity said in an Oct. 13 analysis that the proposals could change how contracts handle “out of gas” errors. Some contracts are written to catch a failed call and keep going. In certain designs, developers appear to have relied on gas running too low for any follow-up action to complete, which meant the whole transaction would still revert.

Under Glamsterdam’s proposed accounting, some of that gas could be restored when changes are undone. That could leave enough room for a contract to complete a failure-handling step that previously would have been rolled back. A behavior developers treated as safely self-canceling could, under the new rules, finish just enough work to matter.

There is a second risk in the other direction. ChainSecurity calculated that creating a new storage slot could become far more expensive in some cases — 110,020 gas rather than 22,100 under the old rules. That means a contract operating with an older gas budget could fail while carrying out an otherwise valid action.

What has not been shown matters here. CoinDesk reported that ChainSecurity demonstrated the mechanism, but has not publicly established that a major live protocol is exploitable through it. The report also said there is no indication that existing contracts are currently being exploited through these proposed changes.

Glamsterdam includes other planned updates, including a new system for choosing block builders and changes meant to help Ethereum handle larger blocks. It already completed activation on the Sepolia testnet. Hoodi was supposed to be the next public rehearsal, along with a planned gas-limit increase to 200 million. Both are now postponed while developers decide whether a cleanup in accounting would also disturb old contract assumptions.