Ethereum Developers Postpone Glamsterdam Testnet Fork After ChainSecurity Finds 13 Contracts Exposed to New Gas Rules

Ethereum client teams have cancelled the Glamsterdam upgrade on Hoodi, the last public test network before the main network. The fork had been set for October 26 at 17:42:48 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), at epoch 132,352. The Ethereum Foundation said that no new activation date has been set and that its notice replaces the earlier Hoodi schedule and instructions. Developers made the decision on an October 22 coordination call, CoinDesk reported.

The delay followed a disclosure from ChainSecurity, a Zurich-based smart-contract auditor. The firm said its researchers had identified security risks in contracts that are already deployed. It counted 13 real-world examples and said it is notifying the affected projects privately before it publishes details, according to DeFi Prime. The problem lies in Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 8037 and a companion proposal, EIP-8038. Both change how Ethereum prices gas and manages state. EIP-8037 makes an operation's cost depend on how much new permanent state it writes, which makes contract deployment and heavy storage writes more expensive, Alchemy's developer guide explains.

The researchers showed that the new rules change how some existing contracts behave when a transaction runs short of gas. Today, such an operation usually reverts the whole transaction. Under the new rules, a contract that catches a failed internal call could permanently record that failure instead. Suppose a contract stores a failed payout, or marks a request as used, as a final result. Whoever chooses how much gas to supply for that transaction can then make the failure permanent. CryptoSlate reported that the risk falls on existing contracts. In most cases their code cannot be changed after deployment, and some of their authors no longer maintain them.

Glamsterdam's schedule has slipped several times already. Its Sepolia testnet date was moved to October 6 after earlier delays, 24/7 Wall St. reported. An earlier developer network exposed a consensus-layer bug serious enough to stop the chain. It also exposed an EIP-8037 implementation flaw that forced every execution-client team to revise its code, Alchemy noted. crypto.news reported that no main-network date has been confirmed.

The exposure is large. Ethereum holds $49.72 billion of the $90.69 billion locked in decentralized finance (DeFi), according to DeFiLlama data. Any change to how its existing contracts execute therefore reaches more than half of on-chain DeFi value.