Ethereum developers have postponed the Hoodi test network’s Glamsterdam upgrade, according to an October 22 announcement. The change creates more time to investigate how proposed gas rules interact with contracts already deployed on mainnet.
TL;DR: Hoodi’s October 26 activation is postponed without a replacement date. The review concerns contract compatibility. The announcement does not establish Ethereum’s mainnet upgrade schedule.
Why changing gas can change contract behaviour
Gas is the unit Ethereum uses to meter computational work. A transaction’s gas budget helps bound the resources it can consume, while individual operations carry specified costs. Developers sometimes make assumptions about those costs when designing calls between contracts.
The proposed EIP-8037 specification changes how Ethereum charges for creating persistent state. It separates that resource from ordinary execution work and raises its cost, with the aim of controlling the growth of data that nodes must retain. The proposal remains subject to review.
Persistent storage creates an ongoing obligation for a network: data written during one transaction may need to remain available long afterward. Accounting for that obligation is different from charging for a calculation that ends when execution finishes. That distinction helps explain the motivation for separate treatment.
Security firm ChainSecurity’s October 13 analysis examines EIP-8037 alongside the state-access repricing proposal EIP-8038. It describes cases where revised gas accounting could allow a failure-handling path to finish when it previously would have reverted. That can alter a contract’s behaviour even when its own code is unchanged.
The issue illustrates why compatibility testing involves more than checking that transactions remain valid. Applications may also depend on the circumstances in which calls fail, how errors propagate and how much work a caller can permit another contract to perform.
What the postponement changes
The Hoodi update removes the planned Amsterdam execution-layer activation, Gloas consensus-layer activation and associated increase to a 200 million gas limit. Operators need updated configurations in both clients before the originally scheduled activation. Existing Hoodi chain history remains intact.
A test network gives client teams and application developers a place to examine those interactions before production deployment. Pausing its schedule can allow a problematic assumption to be isolated, reproduced across implementations and addressed before the same change is considered for a wider rollout.
For contract teams, the useful question is whether their systems rely on fixed gas allowances, precise failure behaviour or recovery paths after an external call. Those dependencies are more informative for compatibility work than whether an application’s source code has recently changed.
The next substantive milestone will be a documented resolution of the compatibility questions and an updated testnet plan. Until then, the postponement establishes a review period; it does not settle which technical adjustment will be adopted.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
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