Ethereum Foundation Reviews Four Reports on Glamsterdam Contract Risks

The Ethereum Foundation is reviewing four reports on deployed contracts that may fail under Glamsterdam’s proposed gas rules, adding specific cases to a test-fork delay with no replacement date.

The Hoodi test fork was previously delayed amid concerns about how the proposed gas accounting could affect deployed contracts. The fork had been scheduled for Oct. 26. The Foundation has not set a new date for Hoodi or announced a mainnet activation date for Glamsterdam.

The reports are still under review, and the Foundation is contacting potentially affected protocols. It has not identified the contracts or protocols publicly. The reports describe possible failures; they do not establish that the contracts were exploited or that all Ethereum contracts face the same risk.

EIP-8037 changes the charge for creating state and adds a separate pool of state gas. EIP-8038 changes the cost of operations that access state. Together, the proposals could alter how much gas remains at different points in a contract’s execution.

A contract that catches a failed call to another contract may continue running. Gas returned after a reverted call, or restored when storage is cleared, can leave enough gas for later failure-handling code to execute. That may change whether a failure causes the entire transaction to revert, depending on the contract’s code path and gas assumptions.

Under the proposed rules, creating a fresh storage slot carries a 97,920-unit state-gas charge, alongside 12,100 units of execution gas for a cold write. If the state-gas pool cannot cover the charge, execution gas may be used. Clearing a slot created earlier in the same transaction can restore up to 97,920 units of execution gas under specified conditions.

The Foundation’s review repository lists eight assumptions for developers and auditors to examine. Examples include whether an out-of-gas call always reverts the full transaction, whether fixed gas budgets remain sufficient and whether readings from gasleft() can only decrease. The Foundation has asked teams to check both their on-chain contracts and related off-chain systems.

Glamsterdam activated on the Sepolia testnet Oct. 6. The Foundation’s schedule sets Nov. 13 for publication of ChainSecurity and Dedaub reports, Nov. 16 for presentation of findings and Nov. 19 for a developer discussion of possible next steps. No decision on specification changes or a new Hoodi schedule has been committed in advance.