Ethlabs tells Ethereum devs to hold Glamsterdam until audits land

Ethlabs, a nonprofit Ethereum research lab, sent core developers a Nov. 10 message: don't move on Glamsterdam's specifications, and don't reschedule the Hoodi testnet, until audit findings and contract-risk clarity arrive. The lab's status report admits to “genuine, unforeseen problems” thrown up by proposed changes to gas accounting. If the reviews show unacceptable impact, Ethlabs says it will weigh spec revisions or a serious rethink of the upgrade's scope.

The Ethereum Foundation's Nov. 9 update raises the stakes. It says four reports flagged deployed contracts that could break under EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. Developers are prototyping possible revisions, and the Foundation insists no decision has been pre-committed.

Hoodi is still parked. Core developers cancelled the testnet's Oct. 26 activation, no replacement date has been set, and the upgrade specification carries no mainnet activation date.

The fight is over plumbing meant to support bigger blocks. Glamsterdam targets lifting the block gas limit from 60 million toward 200 million, and the two EIPs reprice the work that fills them: EIP-8037 hikes charges for creating persistent blockchain data and adds a separate state-gas reserve, while EIP-8038 makes stored data costlier to access and change.

ChainSecurity's analysis lays out the collateral damage. A contract that catches a failed call and records a permanent failure could, under the new accounting, get enough returned gas or reserve to finish that failure-handling code where it previously would have run dry and rolled back — potentially killing a user's ability to retry. Ethlabs draws a line between ordinary repricing, which it calls necessary for scaling, and accounting changes that produced surprise behavior, and stresses the exposure concerns deploying under today's specs, not an exploit live right now.

Immutable contracts are the flashpoint. Curve's Michael Egorov warned on Nov. 7 that proceeding in the current form could force an emergency reversal. “I am sure, it can be made without breaking immutable contracts which hold funds,” he wrote. Ethlabs says “the onus remains on protocol developers to convince application developers of the safety of the upgrade,” and urges teams to run their apps against the Foundation's gas-invariant checklist and report issues to [email protected]. ChainSecurity and Dedaub reports are due Nov. 13, an open developer Q&A lands Nov. 16, and findings head to All Core Developers Execution on Nov. 19.