A testnet delay, announced November 6

Ethereum's upgrade process has paused a planned step on the Hoodi test network after testing exposed risks for contracts that depend on existing gas-accounting assumptions. In a 6 November 2026 post, Ethereum Foundation developer Marius van der Wijden said AllCoreDevs had decided not to fork Hoodi until the issues were resolved.

The post concerns Glamsterdam, which remains under test. It identifies EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 as the changes behind the compatibility questions and says parallel work on Hegota is continuing. The announcement is not a report that these changes have already caused a mainnet loss.

Why unchanged contracts can behave differently

ChainSecurity's technical analysis describes contracts that use gas remaining after a failed external call to decide whether a failure should be permanent or retryable. That reasoning can depend on the old gas schedule. A change in accounting can leave a failure handler able to finish when it previously would have reverted.

EIP-8037 separates state-creation accounting from execution gas. ChainSecurity explains that the resulting reservoir and gas restoration can undermine assumptions based only on Solidity's gasleft() value. Its analysis also shows why a fixed budget that once covered an operation may cease to be sufficient after repricing.

The review reaches beyond the contract itself

The Foundation is asking developers and auditors to examine eight affected invariants, with a repository of explanations and examples. It says ChainSecurity, Dedaub and internal auditors are participating, while acknowledging that this cannot cover every application or its surrounding off-chain systems.

The practical significance is compatibility across an entire call path. A top-level contract can depend on a proxy, an intermediary and a separate target. Testing only a successful transaction may leave the failure path unexamined. An application's handling of retries and recorded failures is therefore part of the upgrade review.

What would constitute the next milestone

The next meaningful update is evidence that the identified issues have been addressed sufficiently to resume the relevant fork process. That could involve changed specifications, application changes or further testing. The November 6 post does not provide a replacement Hoodi activation date.

For users, this is a development and security-coordination story. It does not create a requirement to transfer ETH, replace a wallet or acquire an alleged upgrade token. The sources describe work on protocol changes and application compatibility, not a migration sale.

The delay also supplies a concrete question for teams preparing releases: which assumptions have been tested against the proposed execution rules, especially after an external call fails? That question is more actionable than treating an upgrade name or an earlier schedule as proof of readiness.

Photograph and reuse credit

Archival photograph: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at TechCrunch Disrupt London, 8 December 2015. John Phillips / TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0. This photograph does not depict the Glamsterdam testing or attribute the November decision to Buterin. Original image supplied without editorial alteration; source and licence are linked below.

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Researched and published by CryptoGov Editorial Desk. Source publication and effective dates are explained in the article where relevant.