Ethlabs Urges Ethereum Devs to Delay Hoodi Fork Until Audits Land

Ethlabs has formally urged Ethereum core developers to postpone any revision of Glamsterdam's specifications and to withhold setting a new Hoodi testnet fork date until two pending audits are published and their operational effects are understood.

The Ethereum Foundation commissioned ChainSecurity and Dedaub to review EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, two proposals that alter gas costs and gas accounting on the network. Audit results are expected before Nov. 16. Ethlabs argues that developers should not change upgrade specifications or select a replacement Hoodi date until those results are in hand and their consequences for deployed contracts are clear.

The timeline is tight but structured. An Ethereum core developers (ACD) testing meeting is scheduled for Nov. 16 and will include a public question-and-answer session. An execution-layer meeting follows on Nov. 19, where developers expect to discuss the audit results. That Nov. 19 gathering could decide whether the Glamsterdam specifications require revision.

What does this change for deployed contracts?

The practical stakes center on Ethereum's existing contract base. Glamsterdam aims to raise the protocol's per-block gas limit from 60 million to 200 million — a 3.3-fold increase that would more than triple throughput capacity per block. But the mechanism for getting there matters as much as the destination.

Ethlabs warns that the proposed gas-cost changes under review could affect smart contracts already deployed on Ethereum. Two specific risks stand out:

• Contracts and tooling built around fixed operation costs may behave incorrectly if those costs shift.
• A contract could see more gas remaining after an internal call reverts, potentially leading it to misjudge whether the call failed because it ran out of gas.

The second failure mode is the subtler one. Gas accounting is a load-bearing assumption in countless deployed contracts; audit tooling, fallback logic and error-handling paths often branch on how much gas survives a reverted internal call. A change in that residual amount can silently break assumptions that were correct at deployment time and have held for years.

A delay already in motion

Ethereum developers have already postponed Hoodi activation and have not set a replacement date. That earlier postponement followed concerns about gas-security effects on deployed contracts — the same category of risk the pending audits are designed to quantify.

For infrastructure operators, auditors and protocol teams, the sequencing question is straightforward: audit findings first, specification decisions second, fork scheduling last. Ethlabs's position is that reversing that order would leave developers choosing a testnet date against incomplete information about changes that touch core execution-layer mechanics.

The Nov. 16 ACD testing meeting and its public Q&A session offer the first checkpoint. If ChainSecurity and Dedaub deliver their findings before that date as expected, the Nov. 19 execution-layer meeting becomes the decision point — where developers either reaffirm the current EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 specifications, revise them in response to audit findings, or defer again. Until that meeting concludes, Hoodi remains unscheduled, and teams building against Glamsterdam's gas parameters are working with specifications that may still change.