The Ethereum Glamsterdam delay has taken the October 26 Hoodi test off the calendar. The Ethereum Foundation says the testnet upgrade and its planned increase to a 200 million gas limit have been postponed while developers investigate how proposed gas changes interact with existing smart contracts. No replacement activation date has been set.
This is a change to a testing milestone—not an announcement that Ethereum mainnet has stopped or that ETH holders must move their coins. The Foundation’s October 22 postponement notice supersedes the earlier Hoodi schedule. Mainnet timing remains unconfirmed.
Our October 22 report covered the original Hoodi plan. That activation date is now out of date. The important question is why developers paused the rehearsal before applying the proposed rules more widely.
What changed in the Hoodi schedule?
Hoodi was due to activate Glamsterdam on October 26, 2026, at 17:42:48 UTC. That activation is no longer scheduled. The Foundation says the Amsterdam execution-layer and Gloas consensus-layer activations were removed from the updated configuration, together with the planned 200 million gas-limit schedule.
There is no replacement activation epoch or timestamp to count down to. A new schedule will need a separate announcement. The Foundation also added a prominent update to its original October 16 announcement, warning that the earlier schedule and activation instructions have been superseded.
Why the gas rules need another look
The concern is not simply whether Ethereum can process bigger blocks. It is whether contracts written for today’s gas behavior still handle failures safely under tomorrow’s rules. Gas measures the work a transaction can pay the network to perform. Contracts can make decisions based on how much gas remains after calling another contract.
In its October 13 technical analysis, ChainSecurity examined EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. These proposals change the pricing and accounting of state creation and state access—the work involved in creating and reading blockchain records. Under the proposed design, a separate state-gas reservoir and gas refills can change what a contract can afford to do after a call fails.
Some contracts catch a failed operation and record that failure, continue a batch or choose a fallback. A failure path that previously ran out of gas and reversed could have enough gas to finish under the new accounting. That can matter if recording a failure removes the chance to retry an otherwise valid operation.
The risk also runs in the other direction. Repriced operations can need more gas than an old fixed budget allows. Delivering the amount of gas a developer requested is not the same as delivering enough gas for the operation under changed rules.
A testnet pause is not proof of a live exploit
The distinction matters for anyone reading an alarming headline. ChainSecurity’s work describes mechanisms that can change contract behavior under proposed upgrade rules. It should not be read as evidence that Ethereum mainnet is already running those changes or that a major production protocol has been exploited through them. CoinDesk’s October 23 report likewise distinguishes the demonstrated mechanisms from a publicly established exploit of a major production protocol.
The postponement gives client teams and application developers more room to investigate compatibility before rescheduling the public rehearsal. It does not supply an ETH price target, a guaranteed mainnet launch date or a promise about future transaction fees.
What operators and ETH holders should watch
Hoodi operators should follow the updated Foundation notice and their client teams’ current instructions rather than act on the superseded October 16 schedule. Application teams should review gas budgets, failure-handling paths and assumptions about remaining gas, then test the behavior they actually depend on.
For everyday ETH holders, the checkpoint is a new, explicit upgrade announcement—not a countdown based on the canceled date. No token swap or movement of funds is required because this Hoodi test was postponed.
Quick answers
Is Glamsterdam still activating on Hoodi on October 26?
No. The Ethereum Foundation says the October 26 activation and scheduled 200 million gas-limit increase have been postponed.
What is the new Glamsterdam Hoodi date?
No replacement activation date has been set in the Foundation’s postponement notice.
Is this an Ethereum mainnet upgrade delay announcement?
The notice concerns Hoodi. It does not set a mainnet activation date, and a testnet schedule should not be treated as one.
This article is for information, not investment advice. Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration, not a photograph of a network event.
