Ethereum pauses Glamsterdam Hoodi fork over gas-accounting risks

What happened

Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade has run into a compatibility check. In a November 6 update, Ethereum Foundation developer Marius van der Wijden said the testing process would not advance to the Hoodi fork until problems found during testing are addressed, according to NewsBTC.

The issue is not that the Ethereum network has stopped working. Some existing applications may break because they depend on assumptions about how gas is charged, and the upgrade would change those assumptions. The Foundation singled out EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 as the proposals needing closer review.

The Foundation said ChainSecurity had identified projects that could be vulnerable after Glamsterdam because they rely on invariants the proposed changes would break. An invariant is a condition developers expect to keep holding. Breaking one does not automatically mean a contract can be exploited, but it can cause incorrect behaviour, unexpected failures or security exposure.

The engineering team is working with ChainSecurity and Dedaub alongside internal auditing. It has also published a repository describing eight relevant invariants, with examples developers can check. The Foundation said AllCoreDevs decided not to fork Hoodi until the issues were resolved, while work on the later Hegota upgrade continues in parallel.

Why it matters

Blockchain upgrades must improve the platform without unexpectedly damaging applications already deployed on it. Because the network is open, developers cannot inspect every third-party contract, off-chain integration or custom execution path. Testnets and audits exist to catch this kind of problem before users encounter it in production.

Blockonomi reported that the risk for deployed contracts may sit outside core business logic. Fixed gas stipends, hardcoded gas limits and assumptions about remaining gas could produce unexpected results, meaning a transaction might fail, an integration could misprice execution, or security checks could behave differently. Even a contract that appears unchanged could be affected if another component makes assumptions about its gas use.

The separation from Hegota work suggests the immediate bottleneck is the Glamsterdam compatibility review rather than a blanket suspension of Ethereum development. The November 6 post did not set a new final deployment date.

Background

Glamsterdam re-prices state creation and state access to better reflect resource use. According to Blockonomi, EIP-8037 separately meters and raises costs for creating new state, while EIP-8038 updates the costs of accessing existing state. The changes aim to align gas charges with the work required by current Ethereum state and to support a rise in gas limits without ignoring state growth.

Earlier developer guidance flagged fixed gas stipends, hardcoded gas limits and remaining-gas checks as likely trouble spots. The work applies to test environments and future deployment planning, not to Ethereum mainnet today.

What to watch

The meaningful milestones are revised specifications if needed, confirmed remediation of affected cases, a successful Hoodi test and clear guidance for applications that may need changes. Node operators will need to follow revised client release notes when a replacement Hoodi schedule emerges.

Teams should check whether their contracts or surrounding code depend on the identified gas assumptions, test against updated specifications and document any affected flows. Blockonomi noted that US spot Ethereum ETFs recorded $93.3 million in outflows on Friday, extending a sixth straight week of withdrawals, but fund flows and protocol engineering should not be treated as one cause-and-effect story.

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