Ethereum postpones Glamsterdam’s Hoodi test over contract risks

Ethereum core developers postponed Glamsterdam’s Hoodi testnet upgrade, citing a need to investigate how EIP-8037 interacts with existing mainnet contracts, the Ethereum Foundation’s Oct. 22 announcement said. The upgrade had been scheduled for Oct. 26 at 17:42:48 UTC, and no replacement date has been set.

The delay removes both the Amsterdam execution-layer and Gloas consensus-layer activations from Hoodi’s schedule, along with a planned increase in the testnet’s gas limit to 200 million. The Foundation said this changes the configuration for a future upgrade; it does not reverse Hoodi’s chain history.

What risk did developers flag in the gas changes?

The concern is that proposed gas rules could change how existing contracts handle failed calls. Security firm ChainSecurity said in its analysis of Glamsterdam’s gas changes that EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 can change both the gas a called contract needs and the amount available to the caller after a failure.

Some contracts catch a failed call and then record the failure or continue to another step. ChainSecurity said a failure handler could complete under the new rules where it previously would have run out of gas and reverted, potentially turning a retryable operation into a permanent failure.

What changes for Hoodi and mainnet?

Hoodi operators should follow updated instructions for their execution and consensus clients, the Foundation said. Its announcement says software or custom configurations that still schedule the Oct. 26 activation need to be updated.

The postponement concerns Hoodi and does not set a mainnet date. CoinDesk reported that the proposed gas changes have not been shown to be exploiting existing contracts; developers have not announced a new Hoodi activation date or confirmed when Glamsterdam will reach mainnet.

Source material

• Ethereum Foundation’s Oct. 22 announcement — blog.ethereum.org
• analysis of Glamsterdam’s gas changes — chainsecurity.com