Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade will not activate on the Hoodi testnet on October 26 as previously announced. The Ethereum Foundation’s October 22 postponement notice removes that activation and the associated increase to a 200 million gas limit. It does not supply a replacement date. For teams preparing a test run, the change means the old calendar entry is no longer a usable deployment target.
The reason is specific: core developers want more time to investigate how EIP-8037 interacts with mainnet smart contracts. That proposal changes the cost of creating Ethereum state. The postponement concerns Hoodi, not a rollback of Ethereum mainnet or an instruction for ETH holders to move funds. The Foundation says mainnet users need take no action because of this update.
This supersedes the schedule described in SekaiTech’s earlier October 26 preparation article. It also exposes a documentation mismatch: when checked on October 25, ethereum.org’s Glamsterdam roadmap still showed a Hoodi milestone on October 27. That page displayed a September 14 update date. The later, dedicated postponement notice explicitly says a new activation date has not been set, so the roadmap entry should not be read as a replacement announcement.
| Official source | What readers should take from it |
|---|---|
| October 16 Hoodi announcement | Its October 26 schedule and activation instructions have been superseded; an update at the top now says so. |
| October 22 postponement notice | The planned activation and gas-limit change are removed. A revised schedule will be announced separately. |
| Glamsterdam roadmap page | Its October 27 milestone conflicts with the newer notice and is not confirmation of a rescheduled fork. |
Why changing state costs needs contract testing
EIP-8037 covers the persistent information that transactions add to Ethereum: new accounts, new storage slots and deployed bytecode. The proposal increases and harmonizes those creation costs and meters them separately. Its stated purpose is to constrain state growth while allowing the network to scale. That is a change to how work is charged, rather than a promise that every transaction becomes cheaper.
The Foundation’s August repricing analysis explains why compatibility is more complicated than raising a transaction’s gas allowance. It replayed historical mainnet transactions under the proposed schedule. Some transactions completed unchanged; others succeeded with differences or needed a higher gas limit. A further group still failed even with a substantially increased allowance.
The analysis points to contracts with fixed assumptions about gas, including hardcoded call allowances and logic that branches on remaining gas. Increasing an externally supplied limit can help a transaction that merely exhausts its allowance. It cannot automatically repair a contract whose internal behavior depends on a particular gas value. Those are different failure modes, which is why a calendar delay and a compatibility investigation belong in the same story.
For Hoodi operators, postponement also requires a configuration change. The Foundation says the removed schedule covers both Amsterdam on the execution layer and Gloas on the consensus layer. It does not revert Hoodi’s chain history. Operators should use client instructions that explicitly incorporate the postponement, rather than assuming versions listed in the original announcement already contain it.
Application teams therefore have two separate tasks: stop treating October 26 as the Hoodi activation target, and continue investigating contract behavior under the proposed pricing rules. The official notice leaves the next activation epoch and timestamp unset. A replacement schedule needs its own announcement; neither the old release table nor a conflicting roadmap date supplies one.
Sources
- Ethereum Foundation: Hoodi postponement, scope and revised client guidance
- Ethereum Foundation: original Hoodi announcement with the October 22 supersession notice
- EIP-8037: state creation gas cost proposal
- Ethereum Foundation: repricing impact and historical transaction replay
- Ethereum.org: Glamsterdam roadmap, checked October 25 for the conflicting milestone