Ethereum Delays Glamsterdam Testnet Step Over Gas-Accounting Risks

TL;DR: Ethereum developers have postponed the next Glamsterdam hard-fork step on the Hoodi testnet after researchers identified applications that may depend on gas-accounting assumptions the upgrade would change. The Ethereum Foundation is asking teams to audit code before the process advances.

Ethereum’s next major protocol upgrade has hit an important compatibility check. In a November 6 update, Ethereum Foundation developer Marius van der Wijden said the Glamsterdam testing process would not proceed to the Hoodi fork until problems identified during testing were resolved.

The concern is not that the Ethereum network has stopped functioning. Rather, some existing applications could break because they rely on assumptions about how gas is charged. The Foundation identified EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 as the proposals that require closer scrutiny.

Ethereum gas is commonly understood as the cost of executing transactions and smart-contract operations. Developers also use gas-related properties inside application design and testing. If the protocol alters the accounting model, code built around old assumptions can behave differently even when its business logic has not been edited.

The Foundation said ChainSecurity had found projects that could be vulnerable after Glamsterdam because they depend on invariants that the proposed changes would break. An invariant is a condition developers assume will continue to hold. Breaking one does not automatically mean every affected contract can be exploited, but it can introduce incorrect behaviour, unexpected failures or security exposure.

The engineering team is working with ChainSecurity and Dedaub, alongside internal auditing efforts. It has also published a repository describing eight relevant invariants and examples that developers can check. This is a call for affected application teams to participate in the review, not merely an internal protocol discussion.

Blockchain upgrades have a difficult obligation: improve the underlying platform without unexpectedly damaging applications already deployed on it. The network is open, and its developers cannot inspect every third-party contract, off-chain integration or custom execution path. Testnets and audits are designed to identify precisely this kind of problem before users face it in production.

The Foundation said AllCoreDevs decided not to fork Hoodi until the issues were resolved, while work on the later Hegota upgrade would continue in parallel. That separation is useful. It suggests the immediate bottleneck sits in the Glamsterdam compatibility review rather than a blanket suspension of all Ethereum development.

For operators, the responsible response is practical rather than dramatic. Teams should check whether their contracts or surrounding code depend on the identified gas assumptions, test against the updated specifications and document any affected flows. Even a contract that appears unchanged could be involved if another component makes assumptions about its gas use.

The November 6 post did not establish a new final deployment date, so assigning one would be speculation. The meaningful milestones are revised specifications if necessary, confirmed remediation of affected cases, a successful Hoodi test and clear guidance for applications that may need modifications.

Ethereum’s wider activity continues independently of this testing decision. NewsBTC has recently tracked ETF flows, but fund demand and protocol engineering should not be collapsed into one cause-and-effect story. Here, the verifiable development is a cautious pause after discovering compatibility risk. For a network hosting substantial financial activity, finding that risk before deployment is the critical distinction.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

Featured image: Ethereum coin illustration (illustrative graphic for Ethereum Glamsterdam testnet coverage). Graphic: Wikideas1 via Wikimedia Commons, released under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication.