Ethereum core developers agreed to postpone Hoodi’s testnet upgrade while teams investigate how proposed gas-pricing changes could affect existing smart contracts, according to TechFlow’s report published on November 6, 2026, at 22:09:43 UTC+8.
The report identifies EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, proposed for the Glamsterdam upgrade, as the changes under review. It describes a compatibility investigation ahead of activation—not failures observed following an activated fork.
What the proposals would change
According to TechFlow, the two proposals aim to separate the pricing of state creation from state access and revise gas charges for particular opcodes. The stated objective is to better reflect the hardware costs of maintaining and accessing Ethereum’s growing state, while limiting unchecked state growth.
These are execution-layer changes: the concern is how contracts run under revised gas costs, rather than a change to validator consensus duties.
Why existing contracts could be affected
TechFlow attributes the compatibility findings to security firm ChainSecurity. Its analysis reportedly identified eight assumptions, or “invariants,” that contracts and off-chain infrastructure have relied on concerning gas consumption. The article describes several examples rather than enumerating all eight.
- Hard-coded gas limits: Some contracts cap the gas supplied to another contract to constrain execution or help defend against reentrancy. If the called operations become more expensive, a previously successful call could run out of gas and revert.
- Exception-handling logic: Error-recovery paths can depend on assumptions about how much gas an inner call consumes. Repricing could change which execution path a transaction takes.
- Proxy gas forwarding: Some proxy contracts forward gas using fixed proportions. Changed costs could disrupt downstream execution and, in some cases, leave funds locked in an unfinished state-machine branch.
The report presents these as potential compatibility risks, not evidence that every contract using these patterns would fail.
What developers are checking before activation
According to TechFlow, developers agreed at an All Core Developers meeting not to proceed with Hoodi’s hard fork until they better understand which contracts could be affected and can provide compatibility guidance. The article identifies multisignature wallets, bridges and decentralized lending protocols as potential areas of concern.
The Ethereum Foundation reportedly issued a call for ecosystem-wide self-checks and published a repository describing the eight affected assumptions, example problem code, and prompt templates for audit tools and code scanners.
TechFlow also attributes an important limitation to Ethereum researcher Marius van der Wijden: reviewing public on-chain code cannot capture all dependencies in proprietary off-chain routing systems, settlement scripts and liquidation bots. Application teams, auditors and infrastructure operators therefore have a role in checking their own systems.
At the time of publication, core developers and security teams were scheduled to review the first self-assessment results at the following week’s ACD meeting and reconsider Hoodi’s activation conditions and any necessary adjustments. The report did not provide a replacement activation date.
Original source: TechFlow, published November 6, 2026, at 22:09:43 UTC+8.