Ethereum’s All Core Developers have delayed the implementation of the Glamsterdam hard fork on the Hoodi testnet. The Ethereum Foundation announced the decision in a blog post on November 6, 2026, responding to ChainSecurity audit findings from October 13 that identified eight smart contract invariants at risk of breaking. The technical upgrade has been put on hold until all contract compatibility issues are fully resolved.
Far from a routine schedule adjustment, the audit findings directly impact the underlying execution logic of smart contracts across the network.
Why New Gas Accounting Risks Altering Contract Behavior
The root of the technical issue stems from two improvement proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. Both proposals alter gas charging mechanisms for state creation and state access on the Ethereum blockchain.
In practice, several active smart contracts rely on fixed gas budgets or operate on assumptions regarding remaining gas after an external call fails. Under Glamsterdam’s new gas accounting rules, gas previously assumed to be consumed could instead remain available for subsequent execution.
This returned gas allows contract operations to continue running, even though developers originally designed the transaction to revert entirely when an external call failed. ChainSecurity warned of serious risks stemming from this anomaly: transactions that should fail could end up permanently recorded on the ledger, while legitimate transactions could lose retry options.
Pausing Testnet Deployment to Map Ecosystem Impact
Following the findings, the Ethereum Foundation released a public GitHub repository documenting the eight affected invariants. Most findings center on fixed gas budget constraints and gas reserves.
Marius van der Wijden, a developer at the Ethereum Foundation, stated that core developers are now collaborating with ChainSecurity and Dedaub while conducting internal audits to map the impact across the decentralized application (dApp) ecosystem.
The halt on Hoodi also suspends the activation of the Amsterdam execution layer and Gloas consensus layer, while delaying plans to test raising the testnet gas limit to 200 million. Glamsterdam was previously activated on the Sepolia testnet on October 6, 2026, serving as one of the final major trials ahead of its mainnet rollout.
For application developers on Ethereum, the delay on the Hoodi testnet provides critical time to review external call logic within their codebases before the new gas accounting rules reach mainnet.
Reported by crypto.news.
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