Ethereum asks developers to test Glamsterdam gas assumptions before Hoodi resumes
A new review flags eight gas-accounting assumptions that EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 may break, prompting a contract-audit call before the testnet fork proceeds.
In brief
- Ethereum developers are being asked to test whether their contracts rely on eight gas-accounting invariants changed by EIP-8037 and EIP-8038.
- The Hoodi testnet fork remains paused while core developers assess affected projects and possible specification changes.
- The issue is a pre-mainnet compatibility review, not evidence of an active Ethereum mainnet incident.
A developer audit call replaces a simple delay notice
The Ethereum Foundation on 6 November asked contract developers, auditors and infrastructure teams to examine whether their software depends on gas-accounting behaviour that the proposed Glamsterdam upgrade would change. The request adds a concrete technical task to the Hoodi testnet postponement announced in October. According to the Foundation, recent ChainSecurity work identified projects that could be affected by EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, and Ethereum’s All Core Developers process has kept the Hoodi fork on hold while the issues are investigated. The Foundation published a repository describing eight invariants that will no longer hold under the current proposals and asked affected teams to report their findings. That feedback is intended to inform whether application code, tooling or the specifications themselves should change.
Why gas assumptions can alter contract outcomes
EIP-8037 would separate and raise charges for creating Ethereum state, using a state-gas reservoir alongside ordinary execution gas. EIP-8038 would reprice access to existing accounts, code and storage. The combined effect is not limited to a higher transaction estimate. ChainSecurity’s analysis shows that a failed external call can return a different amount of usable gas than an existing contract expects. A failure handler that previously ran out of gas and reverted could instead finish and record a failure as permanent, even when the underlying operation should remain retryable. The reverse risk also matters: a hard-coded budget that once covered a permitted execution path may become too small after state creation and access costs change.
What application teams should examine
The review should extend beyond headline transaction fees. Teams need to inspect low-level call wrappers, batch processors, retry queues, gas forwarded under EIP-150, checks based on gasleft(), delegated-code paths and off-chain components that hard-code gas limits. Simulators, relayers and account-abstraction infrastructure may also encode assumptions about whether a call failed because of application logic or because its gas budget was exhausted. The Foundation’s invariant list includes examples and suggested prompts for code review, but it does not replace project-specific testing. Developers who identify affected behaviour are being asked to contact the Foundation so the core-development discussion has evidence from deployed systems rather than only synthetic test cases.
What the finding does — and does not — mean
This is a pre-mainnet compatibility warning during testnet preparation, not a disclosure that Ethereum mainnet has been compromised. Glamsterdam is designed to support higher throughput while making state growth and access costs reflect their burden on nodes. Those goals remain, but the current pause shows why fee-market changes must be evaluated as execution-semantics changes as well as pricing changes. No revised Hoodi activation date was provided in the 6 November notice. Until core developers settle the specifications and publish a new schedule, applications with custom gas accounting should treat current Glamsterdam behaviour as subject to change.
Sources and verification
Based on an official announcement
Checked the 6 November Ethereum Foundation notice against the current EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 specifications. Distinguished today’s developer-review request from the site’s 22 October Hoodi-delay coverage and avoided presenting the pre-mainnet issue as an active mainnet incident.
- EIP-8037/EIP-8038 Glamsterdam Ethereum Foundation · Primary document · 6 Nov 2026
- EIP-8037: State Creation Gas Cost Increase Ethereum Improvement Proposals · Primary document · 1 Oct 2025
- EIP-8038: State-Access Gas Cost Update Ethereum Improvement Proposals · Primary document · 3 Oct 2025
Prepared with AI assistance from the linked sources. This is not a claim of independent field reporting or human review. How we publish · Report a correction
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