Ethereum core developers have postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet, which had been scheduled to activate on October 26 at 17:42:48 UTC. The delay was decided at the All Core Developers Execution call #248 to allow more time for studying how EIP-8037, a gas pricing mechanism change, behaves with smart contracts already running on the mainnet. No replacement date has been set.
EIP-8037 raises the gas cost of creating state—the account and storage data that every node must maintain—and meters that cost separately from other changes. The original Hoodi announcement had already advised application developers that contracts relying on fixed gas stipends or hardcoded gas limits may require modifications.
Testnet Impact and Configuration Changes
The postponement removes the Amsterdam execution layer and Gloas consensus layer activations from Hoodi's configuration, along with a planned increase to the network's gas limit to 200M at that epoch. However, the change is a configuration rollback only, leaving Hoodi's chain history intact.
Operators of Hoodi nodes and validators must check their execution and consensus clients for updated instructions reflecting the postponement, and any software or custom network configuration still pointing to the original date requires updating.
Mainnet Unaffected
Ethereum mainnet users and ETH holders are unaffected by this postponement. No action is required from mainnet participants, and developers have not announced a concrete date for Glamsterdam activation on the main network.
Earlier Testing History
The delay follows testing difficulties that emerged before Glamsterdam's planned October 6 activation on Sepolia. Private development networks had encountered bugs, including chain finalization issues and an EIP-8037-related problem expected to require updates to every execution-layer client. Despite these challenges, Glamsterdam went live on Sepolia on schedule, with Hoodi as the next testing milestone.
