Ethereum (ETH) Core Developers Postpone Glamsterdam Hoodi Testnet Activation 4 Days Out

ChainSecurity Flags 13 DeFi Protocols

Ethereum (ETH) gave up its upgrade date four days before it was due to arrive. The Hoodi testnet activation of Glamsterdam, the network's next major upgrade, had been scheduled for October 26; at the 248th All Core Devs Execution meeting, the session where Ethereum's execution-layer core developers coordinate protocol changes, that plan was withdrawn and no replacement date was set. The change surfaced in a weekly ecosystem review compiled by Ethereum Korea, a group of Korean Ethereum Foundation contacts and ecosystem contributors. Hoodi is one of Ethereum's public test networks, built to rehearse a hard fork before it reaches mainnet.

The trigger was a warning from security researchers at ChainSecurity about two upgrades bundled into Glamsterdam, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, which reprice the cost of certain operations so that the gas fee schedule tracks each operation's real network load more closely. ChainSecurity argued that the repricing could change how already-deployed smart contracts behave in ways their authors never anticipated, and counted 13 DeFi protocols as potentially exposed to the pattern.

The mechanism is narrow but pointed. Some contracts forward a fixed amount of gas to an external call, on the assumption that the call will always fail. If Glamsterdam lowers the cost of a given operation, a call that has failed without exception could suddenly succeed, running code paths developers never expected and altering the contract's state.

What the four-day figure does not settle is scope. Thirteen is a count of flagged candidates, not confirmed breakages, and no incident or lost funds has been reported in connection with the warning. The postponement is also open-ended, and it removes the testnet milestone just days before the activation was meant to go live. This is a protocol-side event rather than an Ethereum price one, though both developments land on the same network and in the same week.

Gas is Ethereum's accounting unit for computation. Every operation carries a defined cost, every transaction carries a total gas limit, and that schedule is written into the protocol itself, which is why repricing it requires a hard fork rather than a settings change.

Glamsterdam's EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 were framed as an accuracy fix: fees for specific operations would finally reflect what those operations actually cost the network. The difficulty, as the warning laid out, is that inside Ethereum (ETH) the gas table does more work than set fees.

Contracts use it as a condition. A call that receives too little gas fails, and a large share of deployed code treats that failure as a designed outcome, a safety guard written on the assumption of permanent failure. Once the cost of an operation drops, deliberately failing calls can flip to succeeding ones, and code that was never meant to execute does.

That is the exposure measured across the 13 DeFi protocols, and it is why the 248th ACDE cancelled the October 26 Hoodi plan outright instead of shipping on schedule.

The delay cascaded straight into the mainnet plan, which had its own date in play. Early December had been floated as a candidate window for the Glamsterdam mainnet fork, but fixes now have to be written and the affected execution paths re-tested, which makes deployment within this year difficult and puts a 2027 mainnet fork in the range of realistic outcomes.

The wider Ethereum ecosystem has run on one discipline through the upgrade path that took the network from Ethereum 1.0 to 2.0 onward: ship throughput, but do not rewrite the behavior of code already deployed. A fee table that can hold up an entire hard fork is that discipline in practice, and the next ACDE agenda, not the calendar, now decides when Glamsterdam ships.

What the Count Does Not Prove

Our reading: the 13-protocol figure is best treated as an audit map, not a damage report. It names the set of DeFi contracts whose code matches the risky forwarding pattern; it does not say any of them has misfired, and none has as of this week's meeting. Traders positioning around the delay have a schedule risk with a defined resolution path: a repricing fix, a re-test, a fresh ACDE decision.

Market context sits in our Ethereum technical analysis and in recent positioning notes on the 200-day average and the open interest flush. What the count cannot settle, until the repricing actually ships, is whether any of the 13 breaks.