The upgrade scheduled to activate today arrived at its appointed time—and then, quietly, nothing happened. That may be the most revealing part of all.
Ethereum’s ($ETH ) Glamsterdam activation on the Hoodi testnet was scheduled for today at 17:42:48 UTC (01:42 tomorrow morning Beijing time, epoch 132352), alongside a plan to raise the block gas limit to 200 million. But at the October 22 All Core Developers Execution Layer meeting (ACDE #248), the Ethereum Foundation decided to postpone it: both the execution-layer Amsterdam and consensus-layer Gloas activations were pulled. A new schedule will be announced separately. There was never a date set for mainnet, and regular holders don’t need to do anything.
The sticking point is quite specific: it’s still unclear how EIP-8037’s gas repricing will interact with contracts already deployed on mainnet. Security firm ChainSecurity has identified 13 real-world cases and is privately notifying the projects involved. Some contracts rely on fixed gas assumptions to determine whether to retry after a failure. If the pricing model changes, the line between a failure and a retryable error could shift too.
This whale’s take: hitting the brakes on the testnet at this point shows that this upgrade changes the underlying rules of the ledger—it’s not something you can wrap up by tweaking a parameter. For large, 200-million-gas blocks to work, the impact on legacy contracts has to be fully understood first. Otherwise, deploying to mainnet could cost far more than a delay of a few weeks. Two things are worth watching next: when the new Hoodi schedule is announced, and whether the EIP-8037 investigation leads to changes in the repricing parameters. Only once those are settled will there be any clarity about a year-end mainnet window.
Ethereum’s ($ETH ) Glamsterdam activation on the Hoodi testnet was scheduled for today at 17:42:48 UTC (01:42 tomorrow morning Beijing time, epoch 132352), alongside a plan to raise the block gas limit to 200 million. But at the October 22 All Core Developers Execution Layer meeting (ACDE #248), the Ethereum Foundation decided to postpone it: both the execution-layer Amsterdam and consensus-layer Gloas activations were pulled. A new schedule will be announced separately. There was never a date set for mainnet, and regular holders don’t need to do anything.
The sticking point is quite specific: it’s still unclear how EIP-8037’s gas repricing will interact with contracts already deployed on mainnet. Security firm ChainSecurity has identified 13 real-world cases and is privately notifying the projects involved. Some contracts rely on fixed gas assumptions to determine whether to retry after a failure. If the pricing model changes, the line between a failure and a retryable error could shift too.
This whale’s take: hitting the brakes on the testnet at this point shows that this upgrade changes the underlying rules of the ledger—it’s not something you can wrap up by tweaking a parameter. For large, 200-million-gas blocks to work, the impact on legacy contracts has to be fully understood first. Otherwise, deploying to mainnet could cost far more than a delay of a few weeks. Two things are worth watching next: when the new Hoodi schedule is announced, and whether the EIP-8037 investigation leads to changes in the repricing parameters. Only once those are settled will there be any clarity about a year-end mainnet window.
