Ethereum Postpones Oct. 26 Hoodi Test as EIP-8037 Gas Repricing Hits a Snag

Ethereum core developers have postponed Glamsterdam’s activation on the Hoodi testnet, scrapping the October 26, 17:42:48 UTC switch-over — and the planned jump to a 200 million gas limit with it. Thursday’s ACDE #248 call took the decision so developers can investigate how EIP-8037’s state-creation gas repricing interacts with mainnet smart contracts. The test was four days away.

The announcement

The Ethereum Foundation announced the postponement on October 22, writing that the update “supersedes the schedule and activation instructions in the Hoodi testnet announcement.” Core developers decided on the ACDE #248 call to delay the upgrade to allow “further investigation of interactions of EIP-8037 with mainnet smart contracts.”

Concretely, the delay removes three things from Hoodi’s schedule: the Amsterdam execution-layer activation, the Gloas consensus-layer activation, and the gas-limit schedule that would have raised Hoodi’s gas limit to 200 million at epoch 132,352. The Foundation describes it as rolling back the configuration for a future upgrade — Hoodi’s chain history is untouched — and says the replacement schedule “will be announced at a later date.” There is no new activation epoch or timestamp.

Node operators are not off the hook. The notice tells anyone running a Hoodi node or validator to check both execution- and consensus-layer clients for instructions reflecting the postponed activation before October 26, and warns that client release tables from the earlier announcement should not be treated as confirmation that those versions incorporate the postponement. So far the Foundation lists updated releases from Lodestar (v1.50.1), Besu (26.10.1), Ethrex (v30.0.1-rc.2, prerelease) and Nethermind (2.2.1) — with Grandine, Lighthouse, Nimbus, Prysm, Teku, Erigon, go-ethereum and Reth still blank.

The combined name is the tell. Glamsterdam is not one upgrade but a coordinated bundle: Amsterdam changing the execution layer, Gloas changing the consensus layer, and a gas-limit schedule to test them under heavier blocks. That three-part structure is why a problem in one component — EIP-8037’s repricing — scrubs the whole rehearsal rather than merely slipping a date. Everything moves together or nothing moves.

Why 200 million gas is the crux

This is where the numbers get interesting — and they come straight from the EIP at the center of the dispute, EIP-8037, currently in Last Call.

State growth is Ethereum’s quiet scaling bottleneck. As of January 2026, a Geth node’s state database held roughly 390 GiB. When the block gas limit rose from 30 million to 60 million, daily new state more than tripled — from about 105 MiB to about 326 MiB per day, or roughly 116 GiB per year. The EIP’s authors then do the extrapolation that stopped the Hoodi schedule: at a 200 million gas limit, state would grow at about 387 GiB per year. Starting from 390 GiB, that pace breaches the 650 GiB threshold — the point where nodes begin experiencing performance degradation — in less than a year.

Do the division yourself: 650 minus 390 leaves 260 GiB of headroom, and 260 divided by 387 is about 0.67 years — roughly eight months. That is the runway a 200M gas limit buys the network without the repricing.

EIP-8037’s answer is to make state creation pay its true cost. It introduces a cost-per-state-byte (CPSB) of 1,530 gas per byte, targeting average state growth of 120 GiB per year at a 150 million gas limit — harmonizing what are today wildly different prices for creating the same new state (contract deployment costs ~200 gas per new byte; new storage slots cost ~313). It also meters state creation on its own gas dimension, so throughput can rise without every transaction tripping a single gas cap.

The repricing is not abstract. Under the proposal, the 32,000-gas contract-creation charge becomes 120 bytes × CPSB; the 200-gas-per-byte code-deposit fee becomes CPSB per byte; a 20,000-gas storage write becomes 64 bytes × CPSB. Every contract deployment and every storage slot on mainnet gets a new price tag — which is precisely why developers need to investigate how the change interacts with contracts already deployed before they rehearse it on a testnet.

Here is the paradox the delay exposes: Hoodi needed the 200M gas limit to rehearse mainnet-scale blocks, but 200M gas without the repricing degrades the node fleet within about eight months — and the repricing that makes 200M safe changes what every deployed contract pays for state creation, which is exactly the interaction with mainnet contracts that developers now need more time to investigate. The fix and the risk are the same EIP.

Glamsterdam on Hoodi: what changed

The full before/after ledger is carried in the comparison table block below.

The market’s verdict: a shrug

Ether traded at $2,497.88 on October 22, up 2.50% against the October 21 UTC daily close, with a daily range of $2,437.36–$2,521.57 and a $304.76 billion market capitalization (Investing.com figures reported via ad-hoc-news.de). By 20:16 UTC, ETH had slid to about $2,381, down 3.6% on 24 hours — but Bitcoin fell 3.3% in the same window (Motley Fool, citing FMP data), and the day’s crypto coverage was dominated by Wall Street risk-off sentiment, not Hoodi. US spot Ether ETFs had already logged $320.1 million in net outflows for the week ended October 16 (CoinDoo via ad-hoc-news.de).

Read the tape plainly: there is no postponement-driven panic in ETH. The delay is an engineering call, and the market is pricing it as one. The institutional backdrop was already mixed before the announcement: US spot Bitcoin ETFs drew about $526.7 million on October 19 and another $23.2 million on October 20, while spot Ether ETFs lost $26.1 million on October 20 alone (figures reported via thehindubusinessline.com and ndtv.com). Ethereum’s fund flows were lagging Bitcoin’s well before Hoodi slipped — another sign the testnet schedule was never the market’s focus.

TECHi’s own record, corrected

Our October 16 preview told readers three things: Hoodi would activate Glamsterdam on October 26 at 17:42:48 UTC, the testnet’s gas limit would rise to 200 million at the same epoch, and no mainnet date had been set. The first two no longer stand. The third holds — and the postponement reinforces it: the Foundation’s notice explicitly says it “does not set a Glamsterdam mainnet activation date.”

The preview also flagged the Foundation’s half-empty client release tables as the weak point of the schedule. That gap is now part of the story: the new notice still lists several major clients without a confirmed Hoodi release, and operators must update both sides of their stack before October 26 regardless.

One network’s pause is another’s green light: Solana activated Alpenglow earlier this week, cutting finality 98.8% to 150 milliseconds — while Ethereum’s rehearsal went back to the workshop. More of TECHi’s crypto coverage lives in the crypto hub.

What to watch

• The replacement date. The Foundation says a revised Hoodi schedule will be announced separately. Watch whether it lands before year-end or slips with the investigation.
• The client tables. Eight client slots are still blank in the postponement notice. How fast they fill is the real readiness signal.
• The EIP-8037 investigation. If the mainnet-contract interaction forces a redesign of the repricing, the delay could propagate from Hoodi to any mainnet timeline — which, for now, remains officially unscheduled.
• The Last Call clock. EIP-8037 is in Last Call with a deadline of November 1, and parts of the surrounding gas model are explicitly “not yet final.” The investigation’s outcome lands right against that deadline — expect the numbers above to move if the parameters do.