Glamsterdam Upgrade Delay: Ethereum Postpones Hoodi Activation

October 24, 2026 MM Crypto Team

Glamsterdam Upgrade Delay Hits Ethereum’s Testnet Roadmap

The Glamsterdam upgrade delay has become the defining development story for Ethereum this week. At the All Core Developers Execution call ACDE #248, Ethereum core developers decided to postpone the Glamsterdam hard fork’s activation on the Hoodi testnet — originally scheduled for October 26 — indefinitely, while they investigate how two improvement proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, interact with existing mainnet contracts. The Ethereum Foundation announced the suspension on Thursday, October 22, and has not disclosed a replacement date for the testnet activation.

The postponement ripples through the ecosystem immediately. Lido DAO, the governance body behind the largest Ethereum staking protocol, is preparing a community vote on Saturday, October 24, to roll back Glamsterdam-related smart contract deployments it had already staged on Hoodi. Validators running Hoodi nodes have been told to strip out the activation configuration for the canceled date and update their execution and consensus clients to versions that formally discard the fork. The planned increase of the Hoodi gas limit to 200 million was canceled along with the activation.

For ordinary ETH holders, the key fact is reassuring: nothing about mainnet has changed. Mainnet contracts are unaffected, holders of stETH and wstETH need take no action, and no tokens need to be migrated. The Glamsterdam upgrade delay is a testnet scheduling event, not a network incident.

What Exactly Was Postponed

The upgrade was set to activate on Hoodi on October 26 at 17:42:48 UTC, coinciding with Hoodi epoch 132,352. Under the new settings, developers have removed both the Amsterdam execution-layer activation and the Gloas consensus-layer activation. Hoodi node operators must update their software before October 26 to avoid executing a fork that the network is no longer scheduling.

The Foundation’s updated release table lists Lodestar v1.50.1 for the consensus layer, with execution-layer updates including Besu 26.10.1 and Nethermind 2.2.1; Ethrex v30.0.1-rc.2 is listed as a prerelease; instructions for other clients pending. Ethereum researcher Christine D. Kim issued a direct public-service announcement to Hoodi operators, urging them to revert to an older release without the Hoodi upgrade scheduled or wait for their execution-layer client team to ship a version that cancels it. Her message underscored a practical risk: removing the target date prevents desynchronization among validators whose clients might otherwise retain the outdated schedule and fork onto a chain nobody else follows.

The Glamsterdam upgrade delay does not erase anything. The Foundation clarified that the decision affects a future upgrade and does not erase Hoodi’s existing transaction history. And the parallel testnet track continues untouched: Glamsterdam activated successfully on Sepolia on October 6 with the 200-million gas limit in place, giving developers a working environment in which to evaluate the upgrade’s performance. The Hoodi postponement concerns a different testnet with a different risk profile, not the validity of the upgrade itself.

The Security Findings Behind the Decision

At the center of the postponement are EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, two proposals that reshape how Ethereum accounts for gas. EIP-8037 introduces distinct accounting for gas consumed in blockchain state creation and management, while EIP-8038 modifies the costs of accessing current state. Both are part of the technical package behind Glamsterdam’s ambitions — but changing gas accounting touches the assumptions embedded in thousands of deployed smart contracts, some of which were written years before these proposals existed.

That is where ChainSecurity entered the story. In a technical evaluation released on October 13, the security firm cautioned that the proposed gas modifications could change how existing smart contracts handle failed external calls. Some applications depend on remaining gas balances to determine whether an operation has permanently failed or is eligible for retry — a subtle but load-bearing piece of failure-handling logic in batched transactions, withdrawals, and similar functions.

Under the proposed changes, a failed operation could leave enough gas for the calling contract to keep processing, whereas previously the same transaction would have been reverted. ChainSecurity warned that this could result in applications recording an unsuccessful operation as final without ever allowing the user to retry it. On October 22, the firm posted that its findings were the reason for the delay, adding that it had identified 13 real-world examples of potentially affected contracts and was in responsible disclosure with the affected projects — which is why the specific applications have not been named publicly.

Notably, ChainSecurity’s earlier audit work on Lido’s codebase — the protocol has been monitoring EIP-8037 since June 2026 — found no critical vulnerabilities or direct incompatibilities in Lido’s core contracts. The Lido-related findings were favorable, yet governance still chose to pull the Hoodi deployments, aligning with the overall pause in client software. That distinction matters: the Glamsterdam upgrade delay is driven by ecosystem-wide contract compatibility, not by a defect in the upgrade’s core code or in any single protocol.

What Glamsterdam Is Supposed to Do

To understand why the stakes feel high, recall what Glamsterdam is: the upgrade introduces enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) and block-level access lists to strengthen Ethereum’s transaction processing. Enshrining proposer-builder separation in the protocol would formalize arrangements that currently live in external middleware, while block-level access lists let transactions declare up front which state they will touch, making execution more efficient.

Curve Finance had previously flagged potential DeFi advantages of the upgrade while warning that gas-fee modifications could affect some applications — a forecast that now reads as prescient, since DeFi protocols are the heaviest users of the complex batched sub-calls where the gas-accounting changes bite hardest.

The Glamsterdam upgrade delay therefore sits at the intersection of two legitimate pressures. On one side is the protocol’s need to keep evolving: proposer-builder separation and access lists are substantive improvements that the roadmap has been building toward. On the other is Ethereum’s non-negotiable constraint — the existing contract ecosystem cannot be broken by an upgrade, no matter how elegant. When those two pressures collide on a testnet, the correct outcome is a delay, not a gamble.

Lido DAO’s Rollback Vote

Lido’s response illustrates how seriously the ecosystem’s largest stakeholders take testnet discipline. The protocol reported $23.325 billion in total value locked as of October 23, making it by far the largest staking protocol on Ethereum, and its governance token LDO traded at $0.3875 on October 23, up 1.3% over the prior 24 hours, on $34.9 million in daily volume. With that scale, Lido cannot afford ambiguity in its testnet deployments.

The DAO’s technical team confirmed that funds deposited on mainnet remain intact and that the testnet postponement has no impact on operational mainnet contracts. Holders of stETH and wstETH are not required to perform token migrations or adjust their wallets. In parallel, Lido contributors began coordinating directly with node operators, urging validators on Hoodi to check their execution-layer and consensus-layer clients to ensure no configurations tied to the canceled date remain.

The Saturday, October 24 vote will formalize the rollback of the fork-related contracts Lido had preliminarily deployed on Hoodi. Infrastructure operators across the testnet have until October 26 to update their clients. The episode is a useful demonstration of how decentralized governance handles an upstream schedule change: the protocol with the most at stake moves first, communicates clearly, and keeps mainnet users fully insulated.

What This Means for the Mainnet Timeline

Before the postponement, developers had floated December 1, December 8, and December 9 as possible mainnet activation dates for Glamsterdam. The agenda for the October 22 ACDE meeting had even suggested a date might be chosen the following week if Hoodi testing went well. None of those dates has been confirmed, and the Foundation’s announcement offers no revised schedule. Developers will continue assessing the compatibility issues before scheduling another Hoodi activation, and a mainnet date cannot credibly be set until the testnet question is resolved.

It is worth putting this in historical perspective. Ethereum’s upgrade pipeline is designed as a sequence of gates — devnets, then Sepolia, then Hoodi, then mainnet — precisely so that findings like ChainSecurity’s surface before real value is at risk. The Glamsterdam upgrade delay is the pipeline working as designed, not failing. Every major Ethereum upgrade in recent memory has encountered testnet friction: schedules slipped, edge cases emerged, and the network shipped later but safer. A delay discovered on Hoodi in October is infinitely cheaper than a compatibility break discovered on mainnet in December.

For application developers, the Foundation’s guidance is explicit: do not schedule further Hoodi testing tied to the canceled October 26 activation, and mainnet users and ETH holders need take no action. For the market, the read-through is neutral to mildly constructive — the ecosystem’s immune system caught a real issue in the right environment. The question now is how quickly the EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 interaction can be characterized and whether the fix requires changes to the proposals themselves, to client implementations, or to the affected contracts. Until that analysis lands, the December mainnet targets should be treated as aspirational, not scheduled.

FAQ

What is the Glamsterdam upgrade delay? At the ACDE #248 call, Ethereum core developers indefinitely postponed Glamsterdam’s activation on the Hoodi testnet, originally set for October 26, to investigate how EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 interact with existing mainnet contracts. No replacement date has been announced.

What are EIP-8037 and EIP-8038? EIP-8037 changes how gas is accounted for state creation and management; EIP-8038 modifies costs for accessing current state. Security firm ChainSecurity found these changes could alter failure handling in existing smart contracts and identified 13 real-world contracts potentially affected.

Does this affect my ETH or staked ETH? No. Mainnet contracts are unaffected, and stETH and wstETH holders need take no action. The postponement concerns the Hoodi testnet only.

Why is Lido DAO voting? Lido had staged Glamsterdam-related contract deployments on Hoodi. With the activation canceled, the DAO is voting on October 24 to roll those testnet deployments back and keep its testing environment aligned with the official client software.

When will Glamsterdam reach mainnet? Unknown. December 1, 8, and 9 were discussed as possibilities but never confirmed. A mainnet date will depend on resolving the compatibility findings and completing a successful Hoodi activation first.

Source: KuCoin

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