Ethereum developers have postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi test network, which was set for 26 October, CoinDesk reports. They decided at Thursday’s All Core Devs Execution meeting.
A planned increase of Hoodi’s gas limit to 200 million was put off with it. No replacement date has been announced for either, and mainnet has no confirmed activation date for Glamsterdam. Hoodi is the test network where client teams rehearse upgrades before they reach mainnet.
The concern is EIP-8037, which changes how Ethereum charges gas for creating new database records, in order to limit state growth. ChainSecurity published an analysis on 13 October finding that it, together with EIP-8038, could change how contracts respond to failed calls or fee payments.
In one direction, contracts that catch a failed sub-call and carry on could behave differently, because gas spent creating records can be restored when changes are reverted. That may leave enough gas for failure-handling code that previously would have reverted the whole transaction.
In the other, ChainSecurity calculated that creating a new storage slot could cost 110,020 gas when a separate allowance is exhausted, against 22,100 under current rules. Valid operations could then fail. ChainSecurity has demonstrated the mechanisms but has not publicly shown that a major production protocol is exploitable, and nothing suggests current exploitation.
A test network delay is the process doing its job. The open question is whether the rule is changed or contract developers are told to adapt, and CoinDesk’s account reports neither.
