2026

Core

Ethereum

<ul>
 <li>Ethereum core developers postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade’s activation on the Hoodi testnet, originally scheduled for October 26, 2026 at epoch 132,352</li>
 <li>The decision, made at All Core Developers Execution call number 248, was driven by a desire for more time to study how a gas-repricing proposal, EIP-8037, might affect existing mainnet smart contracts</li>
 <li>A planned increase of Hoodi’s gas limit to 200 million, set for the same epoch, was also pulled, and no new activation date has been set</li>
</ul>
The Ethereum Foundation announced on October 22, 2026 that core developers have postponed the activation of the Glamsterdam network upgrade on the Hoodi testnet, a step that had been scheduled for October 26, 2026 at 17:42:48 UTC, corresponding to epoch 132,352. The announcement, posted by the Foundation’s Protocol Cluster, said the delay was decided at All Core Developers Execution call number 248.
The core concern driving the postponement centers on EIP-8037, a gas-repricing proposal that is part of the broader Glamsterdam upgrade package. Developers wanted additional time to study how changing the gas costs of certain operations could interact with smart contracts already deployed on Ethereum’s mainnet, particularly contracts that make specific assumptions about gas costs, such as those relying on a fixed 2,300-gas stipend, hardcoded call-gas limits, or logic built around the gasleft() function that reports remaining available gas during execution.
This concern is not new. The Ethereum Foundation had already flagged the risk in an earlier blog post on August 24, 2026, warning that the EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 gas repricing changes could potentially break layer-1 contracts that rely on those kinds of fixed-gas assumptions. The October 22 announcement represents the concern translating into an actual schedule change, rather than remaining a theoretical warning, with developers choosing to delay rather than risk activating a change on a widely-used testnet before fully understanding its downstream effects.
Alongside the Glamsterdam delay, a separate, previously planned increase to Hoodi’s gas limit, raising it to 200 million at the same epoch, was also pulled from the schedule. The announcement stated plainly that a new activation date has not been set for either change, leaving developers and node operators without a firm new timeline to plan around. The post emphasized that mainnet users and everyday ETH holders need not take any action as a result of the delay, since this affects a public testnet used for development and testing rather than the live Ethereum network that holds real value.
The Foundation specifically advised infrastructure operators to disregard older client release tables that may still reference the original October 26 date, and to instead watch for updated guidance directly from each client development team as a new schedule takes shape. Testnet delays of this kind are a routine part of how Ethereum’s core developers manage the risk of shipping protocol changes, using testnets like Hoodi specifically to catch compatibility issues before they could ever reach the live network. The <a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2026/10/22/glamsterdam-hoodi-delay" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">announcement, published on the Ethereum Foundation’s own blog</a>, gave no estimate for how long the additional study period might take.
This post first appeared in <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://cryip.co/ethereum-developers-postpone-a-testnet-upgrade-to-study-its-effect-on-existing-contracts/">Ethereum Developers Postpone a Testnet Upgrade to Study Its Effect on Existing Contracts</a>

Ethereum Developers Postpone a Testnet Upgrade to Study Its Effect on Existing Contracts

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