Ethereum postpones Glamsterdam test over contract risk

Ethereum developers postponed Glamsterdam’s scheduled October 26 upgrade on the Hoodi testnet to investigate how proposed gas rules interact with existing smart contracts, leaving the next activation date unset. The Ethereum Foundation’s announcement says the change also removes Hoodi’s planned gas limit increase to 200 million.

The concern is about what a contract can do after a call fails. Glamsterdam includes EIP-8037, which separates gas for creating blockchain state into a reservoir, and EIP-8038, which changes the gas cost of accessing state. Security firm ChainSecurity’s technical analysis explains how those rules may change the gas remaining for a contract’s failure handler.

How could a failed call become permanent?

A contract can call another contract, catch a failure and then decide what to do: record the failure, continue a batch or allow a retry. Some contracts rely on a gas check or an automatic out-of-gas revert to stop them from recording a permanent failure when the called operation merely ran out of gas.

Under the proposed rules, a failed call can restore its state-gas reservoir to the level it had when the call began. That gas may then help the calling contract’s failure handler finish, even if it previously would have run out of gas and reverted. A caller who deliberately supplies too little gas could therefore trigger a failure path the contract was designed to prevent.

There is a second issue: new gas prices may make an old budget too small. ChainSecurity calculates that, when the reservoir is exhausted, creating a new storage slot could require 110,020 gas under the proposed rules, compared with 22,100 under the current schedule. A call that once had enough gas to complete may fail instead.

What exactly has Ethereum postponed?

The Foundation says the October 26 Hoodi schedule was removed while developers investigate EIP-8037’s interaction with mainnet contracts. That removes both the Amsterdam execution-layer activation and the Gloas consensus-layer activation, as well as the planned rise in Hoodi’s gas limit to 200 million. The change updates future network configuration; it does not reverse Hoodi’s recorded history.

Does the delay set a mainnet date?

No. The Foundation says the postponement concerns Hoodi and does not set a Glamsterdam mainnet activation date. It has not announced a replacement Hoodi date either. The testnet rehearsal is delayed while developers examine how contracts written under existing gas assumptions would behave under the proposed rules.

Sources

• Ethereum Foundation’s announcement — blog.ethereum.org
• technical analysis — chainsecurity.com