Ethereum postpones Glamsterdam upgrade on Hoodi testnet, no new date set

Ethereum developers have postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on Hoodi, the second public testnet to receive the upgrade, the Ethereum Foundation's (EF) protocol team said in a blog post on Oct. 22. The activation had been scheduled for Oct. 27 at 2:42:48 a.m. KST (epoch 132,352), and no new date has been set. The delay is meant to allow further investigation of how EIP-8037, a new rule for pricing state creation, interacts with smart contracts already running on mainnet.

1. Oct. 6, 10:53 p.m. KSTGlamsterdam activates on Sepolia, the first public testnet
2. Oct. 13Security auditor ChainSecurity publishes an analysis saying EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 can break gas assumptions in existing contracts
3. Oct. 16The EF announces the Hoodi activation for Oct. 27 at 2:42 a.m. KST
4. Oct. 22, 1:20 a.m. KSTSecurity researcher pcaversaccio posts on the core developers' call agenda, flagging "serious security risks" for discussion
5. Oct. 22, 11 p.m. KSTThe execution-layer core developers' call (ACDE #248) decides to postpone the Hoodi activation
6. Oct. 23, 12:02 a.m. KSTThe Glamsterdam schedule is removed from Hoodi's official configuration repository

Only the schedule is removed; Hoodi's chain history stays

According to the EF, the postponement removes both the execution-layer (Amsterdam) and consensus-layer (Gloas) activations. A gas-limit schedule that would have raised Hoodi's block gas limit to 200 million at the same epoch was also dropped. The gas limit is the cap on how much computation a single block can hold. "This rolls back the configuration for a future upgrade; it does not revert Hoodi's chain history," the EF said.

Hoodi node and validator operators need to switch both their execution and consensus layer clients to releases that reflect the postponement before Oct. 26 (UTC). At the time of the post, the EF's table listed Lodestar 1.50.1, Besu 26.10.1, Ethrex 30.0.1-rc.2 (prerelease) and Nethermind 2.2.1, while go-ethereum, Lighthouse, Prysm and others were still blank. The EF told operators not to treat the client release tables in its Oct. 16 announcement as confirmation that those versions incorporate the postponement.

Spent gas can come back after a failed call

EIP-8037, the proposal at issue, separates the cost of creating new accounts and storage (state gas) from ordinary execution gas and draws it from a separate pool, the state-gas reservoir. Under that design, ChainSecurity's analysis said, part of the gas already spent can be refilled after a call to another contract fails. Many contracts have relied on the assumption that if a call fails for lack of gas, too little gas remains and the whole transaction reverts — an assumption the changes break, ChainSecurity said.

As a result, an attacker could deliberately supply too little gas so that a valid operation fails, then have that failure recorded as permanent, ChainSecurity said. Conversely, gas budgets that used to be enough can become too small. With the reservoir exhausted, a first write to an empty storage slot costs 110,020 execution gas, compared with 22,100 under the current rules (Osaka).

"The fundamental 'broken' thing is that gasleft() can increase."

pcaversaccio, comment on the ACDE #248 agenda

He wrote that disclosure to affected protocols is in progress.

December mainnet dates are up in the air again

The call agenda listed Dec. 1, Dec. 8 and Dec. 9 as candidate mainnet activation dates, with a plan to set the date at next week's consensus-layer call (ACDC) if Hoodi went smoothly. According to a meeting summary posted on the Ethereum Magicians forum, ChainSecurity told the call that 13 major DeFi projects are affected and that it is working through responsible disclosure with them. Developers discussed three options — fixing the issues before December, delaying mainnet with the current specifications, or changing the specifications — and agreed to analyze the scope of the impact first.

The EF said the announcement does not set a mainnet date and that no action is required from Ethereum mainnet users or ETH holders. The previous upgrade, Fusaka, went live on mainnet on Dec. 4, 2025 (KST).

ETH at 3.213 million won on Upbit, kimchi premium 0.8%

As of 3:34 p.m. KST on Oct. 23, ETH traded at 3,213,000 won on both Upbit and Bithumb and at $2,406 on Binance. The Upbit price was about 0.8% above the won-converted Binance price — the kimchi premium, or the gap between prices on Korean exchanges and global markets. The funding rate on Binance's ETH perpetual futures was 0.0079%, meaning long positions were paying a small fee to shorts.