Ethereum Delays Glamsterdam Activation on Hoodi After Smart Contract Risks Identified
Key Facts
Ethereum developers postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade path and decided not to activate it on the Hoodi testnet until issues identified during testing are resolved, the Ethereum Foundation said on November 6, 2026. The decision followed findings by ChainSecurity that projects could become vulnerable after the upgrade because they rely on behavioral assumptions that will change under the proposed gas rules. The foundation said Glamsterdam is still being tested on testnets and that it had not set a new date for activation on Hoodi. It said developers and validators need to inspect their contracts before proceeding with the upgrade. The warnings concern the possibility that some operations could fail or perform worse; they do not mean that an ongoing exploit has been confirmed or that funds are locked on mainnet.
The foundation asked contract developers and validators to review 8 behavioral assumptions that could be affected by the change, and published a repository explaining them with examples. The cases identified by the foundation include contracts that rely on fixed gas allocations, values written directly into code, or logic that changes its behavior according to the gas remaining. Examples include the 2,300 gas units allocated to Solidity's transfer and send functions. These assumptions could become a source of failure when the cost of state creation or access changes, even if the contract's logic itself does not change. The foundation therefore asked teams to check whether their applications rely on any of these constants.
Glamsterdam includes two main proposals to reprice state operations. EIP-8037 raises and standardizes the cost of creating new state, including accounts, new storage slots and deployed code, while measuring that cost separately. EIP-8038 raises the cost of accessing state in operations such as SSTORE and SLOAD and cold account access. The foundation said gas prices for state operations have not been adjusted since the Berlin fork in 2021. The new pricing schedule is based on a performance target that supports an almost threefold increase in baseline throughput.
In an analysis reported by CoinDesk, ChainSecurity said creating a new storage slot could require 110,020 gas units when a separate allocation is exhausted, compared with 22,100 units under the previous rules. The gap reflects the scale of the change that contracts could face if they assume new storage operations will remain at their previous cost. However, the foundation said in an earlier assessment that replaying historical transactions on mainnet showed that the vast majority of contracts would not be affected. It added that most of the cases it identified could be fixed by increasing the gas limit. It also said a small group of contracts rely on assumptions that the new schedule changes, which could cause them to fail or perform worse if they are not updated in advance.
The foundation had postponed Glamsterdam's activation on Hoodi in October, when it had been scheduled for October 26, to allow more investigation into how EIP-8037 interacts with smart contracts. The postponement was announced on October 22 without a new date. The decision also removed a schedule that would have raised Hoodi's gas limit to 200 million in the planned activation epoch. In September, the foundation had set October 6 as the date for activation on the Sepolia testnet, while Hoodi and mainnet dates had not been set in that announcement. The current delay shows that completing testnet trials and addressing risks come before any new activation schedule.
The foundation said it is using ChainSecurity and Dedaub for audits alongside internal reviews, but cannot cover every Ethereum project, particularly code that runs off-chain. It had previously advised contract developers to inspect areas that could be affected and test fixes on the Platåberget testnet. It also urged developers of wallets, infrastructure and contract tools to update their gas estimates to reflect the proposed pricing. According to BeInCrypto, Curve Finance founder warned of the possibility of an emergency fork rollback, while developer banteg said the repricing list includes 200,000 affected contracts and objected to its methodology. The outlet also quoted Ethereum community member Ryan Berckmans as reversing his earlier call for the upgrade to be activated quickly, saying: "That was a mistake on my part."
In trading, Ethereum against the dollar closed at $2,240.24 on November 7, 2026, according to EL7 daily data. The price came a day after the foundation announced the upgrade delay, but the data available here does not attribute the price move to the technical decision. The next stated step is to resolve the issues before the upgrade path resumes on Hoodi. The foundation has not set a new activation date or a date for mainnet. Its guidance calls on application developers to test contracts and estimate gas consumption under the new rules before any subsequent transition.