Ethereum postpones Glamsterdam, its next update, for security concerns

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https://cryptoast.fr/ethereum-reporte-glamsterdam-failles-securite-eip-8037-8038/

The Glamsterdam soap opera is experiencing a new twist in the development of the Ethereum network. In a post on its official blog, the Ethereum Foundation confirmed that the hard fork process is once again suspended and that the Hoodi testnet will not be updated with Glamsterdam until the identified issues are resolved.

Gathered during the AllCoreDevs calls, the main blockchain developers decided to delay this new change to the protocol's rules after the findings of the auditing company ChainSecurity.

The latter identified several projects that could become vulnerable once Glamsterdam is deployed, because they rely on “invariants” that the update will break. These invariants are rules taken for granted, such as the gas cost of an operation. At the same time, Ethereum developers report that work on Hegotá, the update planned for 2027, is continuing “at full speed” and is not affected by this Glamsterdam postponement.

More precisely, these are two Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) which were spotted by ChainSecurity, namely EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. In technical terms, EIP-8037 increases the creation of new data in the “state” of Ethereum, that is to say all the information that the network permanently keeps (accounts, storage locations, code), via a dedicated gas reserve. EIP-8038 revises the cost of access to this data.

Several smart contracts currently deployed on Ethereum rely on fixed assumptions (the invariants, mentioned previously) regarding gas budgets and available reserves. Once Glamsterdam is enabled, these assumptions would no longer hold, which could lead to unexpected behavior or even block certain features.

In total, 8 invariants are affected by the Glamsterdam fork. Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden also reminds on X (see message below) that the Foundation has published a dedicated repository on GitHub to identify these invariants. The latter is accompanied by examples and prompts allowing developers to check their projects for themselves.

PSA: Please verify that your contracts are still working after Glamsterdam! We created a repository with Invariants that will be broken after the fork, so you can verify for yourself. https://t.co/jjgWau9hfl

ChainSecurity has not publicly named the projects concerned, but explains that it has identified, as of October 23, 13 real examples of smart contracts potentially affected by the changes to gas that Glamsterdam will cause. The Ethereum Foundation had also already warned that this change could also disrupt wallets, indexers and gas estimators based on fixed hypotheses.

Machine-translated from French