Ethereum (ETH) Core Developers Hold Glamsterdam Fork Off Hoodi Pending 8 Invariants

Hoodi Fork Held Back

Ethereum (ETH) core developers have decided not to fork the Hoodi testnet with Glamsterdam, the network's next major upgrade, until open problems are cleared, the Ethereum Foundation confirmed in a blog post dated November 6. Auditors flagged projects that would break under the revised rules. During testing on the testnet, the audit firm ChainSecurity identified several projects that would turn vulnerable once the upgrade runs. The hold applies to the rehearsal step only. Hoodi exists so hard forks can run against real network load before they reach mainnet, which is why a defect caught there costs a delay rather than live damage. Mainnet activation sits later in the sequence, so the live chain, and with it the Ethereum price, is not directly changed by the postponement. At the center of the problem sit two proposed changes, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. They revise the gas fee charged for certain operations and rework how state, the data that nodes keep and update continuously, is priced. Some projects are written on the assumption that those conditions hold; under the revised accounting, that assumption collapses. The schedule had already slipped once before the audit findings surfaced. On October 22 the foundation announced a delay for a fork that had been set for October 27, and it attached no replacement date. The findings then gave the delay a concrete cause. The foundation brought in ChainSecurity and Dedaub, a second audit firm, to cooperate on the review, and its own internal audits run in parallel. It also stated a hard limit: nobody can cover every project on Ethereum (ETH), including each project's on-chain and off-chain code. The snag sits well before mainnet on the Ethereum upgrade roadmap, in the rehearsal stage.

Scope is what turned a scheduling slip into an open-ended hold. With two audit firms engaged and internal review under way, the foundation stated plainly that full coverage is impossible: it cannot enumerate every project on Ethereum, let alone audit the on-chain and off-chain code behind each one. So the check moves to the builders. Ahead of the next core developer meetings, where the realistic call on timing will be made, the foundation has asked smart contract developers and auditors to inspect their own projects and confirm they do not depend on any of eight listed invariants, fixed conditions the EIP revisions would disturb. An invariant, in this context, is a property a project treats as guaranteed, such as how a given operation will be priced when it executes. Glamsterdam would change several of those guarantees by design. The self-check is effectively a census of which deployed code carries fork-time risk. The stakes come from Ethereum's own history. The chain has taken large forks before, most prominently the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade that moved settlement to Proof of Stake, and each of those transitions ran through the same rehearsal pipeline Glamsterdam now sits in. A fork that ships with broken assumptions takes dependent projects down with it, the exact failure mode the audit findings describe. One part of the pipeline is untouched. Work on Hegota, a separate upgrade, continues in parallel, and the foundation says the Glamsterdam delay has no effect on it. No new fork date exists yet. The next core developer meetings carry that decision, and until the invariant checks come back clean there is nothing to schedule a fork against.

Eight Invariants Decide the Timeline

Our reading: the delay puts a visible price tag on gas accounting reform. Changing what operations cost and how state is metered rewrites assumptions that deployed code was built on, and the eight-invariant checklist is the foundation's operational answer to that risk. Until the checks come back clean, Glamsterdam has no clock: no fork date, no mainnet rehearsal window, and one fewer near-term milestone for teams building on the chain to plan around. Our Ethereum technical analysis tracks the levels traders are watching while the calendar stays open, and we previously followed how the coin defended $2,200 support after a liquidation wave. The number that decides Glamsterdam's next move is eight.