Ethereum’s Glamsterdam Upgrade Stalls on Gas-Change Risks to Live Contracts, Pending Audits

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is asking Ethereum’s core developers not to decide the next step for Glamsterdam, the network’s next upgrade, until outside audits of its gas changes are public, after it received four reports of live contracts that could break.

In a Nov. 9 update, Marius van der Wijden, who wrote the post on the EF’s blog, said that the reports identify deployed contracts “that could break under the proposed changes in EIP-8037 and EIP-8038.” Those two Ethereum Improvement Proposals alter what certain operations cost in gas and how the network charges for storing data, known as state. The foundation said it is working through the reports and reaching out to teams that could be hit, without naming them.

Synthetix founder Kain Warwick, discussing the October testnet cancellation, pointed to the scale of what sits onchain. “There’s so many contracts. There’s so many things to keep in mind,” he said on Unchained’s Uneasy Money, adding that “there is something to be said for, like, Ethereum’s slow, cautious approach to the world.”

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The EF recommended that All Core Devs (ACD), the recurring calls where client teams set upgrade plans, wait “until the audit findings are public and there has been time to review them” before deciding on any spec revision or a new Hoodi date. Hoodi is an Ethereum test network. Several possible revisions are already being prototyped, it said.

The sources give different dates for the audits. The EF’s schedule says engagements with auditors ChainSecurity and Dedaub end Nov. 13, with reports delivered and published. Ethlabs put publication at “by Monday, November 16th,” and the agenda for the Nov. 16 testing call lists completion as expected between Nov. 16 and Nov. 19. The auditors and the EF are set to present findings on Nov. 16, followed by an execution-layer call on Nov. 19 that the EF said has no decision committed in advance.

Ethlabs, which said it has been monitoring and triaging reports for more than two weeks, recommended on Nov. 10 “no decision on Glamsterdam until clarity is achieved.” It said “none of these are currently exploitable,” and that the issues apply only if Glamsterdam ships under its current specifications. Ethlabs said in the post that if the audits turn up problems on an unacceptable scale, it would back spec changes or even “significantly reviewing the scope of Glamsterdam.”

Glamsterdam would raise the gas limit per block to 200 million, more than three times the current 60 million. Developers scrapped its planned Oct. 26 Hoodi fork after ChainSecurity described how gas spent before a failed call could come back under the new rules. The upgrade went live on the Sepolia testnet on Oct. 6, as Unchained reported.

The EF has asked contract developers to check their code against eight invariants listed in a public repository and report any problems to [email protected].

Related Listen: Can ETHlabs Escape the Ethereum Foundation’s Habits? : Uneasy Money

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