Ethereum Foundation Postpones Glamsterdam Upgrade Following Security Review
The Ethereum Foundation has postponed the Glamsterdam hard fork after security audits revealed potential smart contract vulnerabilities linked to proposed gas pricing modifications.
The Ethereum Foundation announced on November 6 that the upcoming Glamsterdam hard fork is being postponed following security concerns raised by ChainSecurity regarding proposed changes to the network's gas mechanism. Development and security teams are currently reviewing the findings to determine whether specifications should be adjusted before proceeding.
The foundation stressed that this is not a cancellation or a network halt. Glamsterdam remains under evaluation on testnets, and no new deployment date has been set for the mainnet. Meanwhile, work on the subsequent Hegota upgrade continues unaffected in parallel.
The security concerns center on how smart contracts price read and write operations on the blockchain. The proposed update suggests increasing the cost of creating new state data and recalculating certain gas fees in a separate pool. Specifically, the draft suggests raising cold account access costs from 2,600 to 3,000 gas units, and storage writing costs from 2,800 to 10,000 units, though these remain proposed figures rather than active tariffs.
From an engineering perspective, the update aims to price new state data creation uniformly and slow down its accumulation, supporting network scaling without overwhelming node databases. The proposal targets roughly 120 gigabytes of annual state growth under a reference gas limit of 150 million.
ChainSecurity's analysis indicates that the proposed pricing adjustments and gas refunds after failed operations could alter error-handling behaviors in existing smart contracts. For instance, contracts relying on specific gas exhaustion assumptions might execute unintended subsequent logic if partial gas is refunded, potentially disrupting retry mechanisms or error logging.
The Ethereum Foundation noted it cannot independently audit all off-chain and on-chain code across the ecosystem. Collaborating with ChainSecurity and Dedaub, the foundation has published eight technical assumptions and urged smart contract developers to audit their codebases accordingly.
