According to Woofun AI, the core developers of Ethereum urgently halted the Glamsterdam upgrade plan originally scheduled to be launched on October 26 at 17:42:48 UTC on the Hoodi testnet after discovering potential risks in the smart contract gas billing mechanism.
The decision was made at a meeting of all core developers held on Thursday to thoroughly evaluate the impact of the proposed changes on the main network's existing contracts. No new upgrade dates have been announced yet.
The core of this storm is EIP-8037. The proposal aims to control the expansion of the size of the Ethereum database by changing the charging method for new database records to cope with the continued increase in network transaction volume. However, security company ChainSecurity pointed out in an analysis report on October 13 that when used in combination with EIP-8038, EIP-8037 may completely change the smart contract's response pattern when gas is exhausted or the balance is insufficient. Many contracts rely on too little gas remaining to trigger transaction cancellation, but the new rules allow the gas that created the record to be restored upon cancellation. This may cause the contract to have enough gas to complete troubleshooting operations that should have been cancelled, thus causing the error state to persist.
According to data compiled by Woofun AI, this change in the mechanism poses a two-way risk: on the one hand, the contract may continue to execute unexpectedly; on the other hand, the gas required to create a new storage time slot has surged from 22,100 units to 110,020 units, causing contracts that rely on the original gas budget to unexpectedly fail when performing effective operations.
Although ChainSecurity has demonstrated the relevant mechanisms, it has not been confirmed that any important application protocols are likely to be used.
The Glamsterdam upgrade was originally planned to introduce a new system for selecting block builders and improve the network's ability to process larger blocks. At the same time, the Hoodi testnet gas limit was also planned to be raised to 200 million units, but this plan was also delayed. The upgraded Sepolia testnet version was activated on October 6, and the suspension of Hoodi's upgrade plan as the next public testing environment reflects the developer's cautious attitude towards core protocol changes.
Notably, ChainSecurity's findings mainly focus on the performance of existing software under the proposed rules. They do not indicate that existing smart contracts are actually being used as a result of these proposed changes, but the potential systemic risks are enough to prompt developers to re-examine the upgrade path.
This delay highlights Ethereum's challenge of balancing the pursuit of scalability with maintaining system stability. As the gas billing mechanism becomes more complex, any minor changes can have a profound impact on existing contracts, particularly in scenarios involving transaction cancellation and status processing. In the future, developers will need to gradually upgrade the network while ensuring backward compatibility to avoid the recurrence of similar risky events. This is a challenge that Ethereum must face as it moves towards higher performance, and it is also an important test of the maturity of its ecosystem.