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, and has added the specific cases to a review process that already forced a delay of the Hoodi test fork with no replacement date set.

The reports concern live contracts that could break under two proposals in the upgrade: EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. The Foundation is contacting potentially affected protocols directly. It has not named the contracts or protocols publicly, and the reports remain under review.

There's an important distinction here. The reports describe possible failures under the new gas accounting. They do not establish that any contract has been exploited, and they don't imply that all Ethereum contracts face the same risk.

Why were the gas rules changed?

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 two proposals could alter how much gas remains available at different points in a contract's execution.

The mechanics matter for any protocol with failure-handling logic. A contract that catches a failed call to another contract may keep 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 shifts whether a failure causes the entire transaction to revert, depending on the contract's code path and its gas assumptions.

The numbers are precise. 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 can't cover the charge, execution gas may be used instead. Clearing a slot created earlier in the same transaction can restore up to 97,920 units of execution gas under specified conditions.

What happened to the Hoodi test fork?

The Hoodi test fork had been scheduled for Oct. 26. The Foundation delayed it amid concerns about how the proposed gas accounting could affect deployed contracts, and it has not set a new date. It also hasn't announced a mainnet activation date for Glamsterdam.

Glamsterdam did activate on the Sepolia testnet on Oct. 6, so the upgrade is already running in a test environment while the contract-risk review proceeds on a separate track.

The Foundation's review repository lists eight assumptions for developers and auditors to examine. Among them:

• Whether an out-of-gas call always reverts the full transaction
• Whether fixed gas budgets remain sufficient
• Whether readings from gasleft() can only decrease

The Foundation has asked teams to check both their on-chain contracts and related off-chain systems, not just the smart contracts themselves.

What comes next on the calendar?

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.

For protocol teams, the operational consequence is direct: contracts with gas-budget assumptions baked into their failure-handling paths need re-examination before Glamsterdam reaches mainnet. The Nov. 13–19 window is when the concrete findings land, and any specification change or rescheduled Hoodi date would follow that discussion.