Ethereum core developers have postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet, canceling an activation originally scheduled for October 26 at epoch 132,352. According to the Ethereum Foundation’s official announcement, developers delayed the fork to investigate how EIP-8037 interacts with smart contracts already deployed on Ethereum mainnet, and no replacement activation date has been set.
The decision was reached during All Core Developers Execution call #248 and reverses the Hoodi configuration prepared earlier in October. The postponement removes both the Amsterdam execution-layer fork and Gloas consensus-layer activation, along with the planned increase of Hoodi’s gas limit to 200 million. It changes the future fork schedule without reverting any existing Hoodi chain history.
Gas Repricing Raises Contract Compatibility Questions
EIP-8037 changes how Ethereum charges for creating new state, including accounts, storage slots and deployed bytecode, while EIP-8038 reprices access to existing state. The broader Glamsterdam repricing package is designed to make gas costs more closely reflect actual resource usage as Ethereum raises Layer 1 capacity, but it also changes assumptions embedded in some existing applications.
The Ethereum Foundation had already warned that historical transaction replays identified a small group of contracts relying on fixed gas stipends, hardcoded limits or gasleft()-based logic. Most tested contracts behave normally under the new pricing schedule, while some require higher gas limits and a smaller subset may need application-level changes.
Security researchers have since identified more subtle execution risks involving failed external calls. In certain cases, changes introduced by EIP-8037 can cause remaining gas to increase during execution, potentially breaking accounting assumptions or allowing code paths to execute that previously would have terminated. These behaviors are relevant to contracts using gas mechanics as protection against insufficient-gas griefing and related failure conditions.
The compatibility review follows Glamsterdam’s successful October 6 activation on Sepolia. Sepolia remains upgraded despite the Hoodi postponement, giving developers a live public test environment for examining EIP-8037, EIP-8038, block-level access lists and enshrined proposer-builder separation.
Hoodi Operators Must Remove the Old Activation
Before the postponement, Ethereum client teams had released software configured for the October 26 fork, including versions covered during Hoodi client preparations. Those releases cannot automatically be assumed safe for Hoodi because some still contain the canceled activation parameters.
Client teams have therefore begun issuing replacement software. Geth v1.17.10, for example, explicitly removes the Amsterdam activation that had been introduced in Geth v1.17.9, while Besu 26.10.1 similarly unschedules the fork. Hoodi node and validator operators need releases whose notes explicitly confirm removal of the October 26 activation, covering both execution and consensus layers where applicable.
The delay also interrupts the progression that began with dedicated development networks and the Platåberget public Glamsterdam testnet. Hoodi was intended to provide another long-lived interoperability checkpoint before developers selected a mainnet activation, particularly under the substantially higher gas ceiling and new block-production architecture.
For mainnet users, however, nothing has changed operationally. Glamsterdam still has no confirmed Ethereum mainnet activation date, and ETH holders or ordinary mainnet users do not need to take action because of the Hoodi postponement. Developers must first resolve the EIP-8037 compatibility questions and establish a revised Hoodi schedule before the upgrade can continue through its remaining deployment stages.
Jack Reynolds is SatoshiPick’s infrastructure mind. Based in Denmark, he follows Bitcoin, Ethereum, Layer 1 networks, stablecoins and DeFi with a practical question always in the background: does this actually make crypto work better?
His articles focus on the systems beneath the headlines: settlement rails, protocol upgrades, stablecoin usage, DeFi coordination and the regulatory limits around them. Jack avoids turning technical coverage into a maze. He explains what is live, what is still experimental and why the difference matters.