Ethlabs, a nonprofit Ethereum research lab, urged core developers on Nov. 10 to await audit findings and greater clarity about contract risks before deciding whether to revise Glamsterdam’s specifications or reschedule its Hoodi testnet upgrade.
In its status report, the lab acknowledged “genuine, unforeseen problems” stemming from proposed changes to gas accounting. It described a review involving the Ethereum Foundation, core developers and auditors, and said it would consider changing the specifications or substantially rethinking the upgrade’s scope if the findings show an unacceptable impact.
The Ethereum Foundation’s latest update, dated Nov. 9, says it received four reports identifying deployed contracts that could break under EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. Developers are prototyping and assessing possible revisions, but the Foundation says no decision has been made in advance.
Hoodi remains on hold after core developers cancelled its Oct. 26 activation. No new date has been set, and the upgrade specification does not list a mainnet activation date.
The dispute centers on changes intended to enable larger blocks without overwhelming the computers that maintain Ethereum’s database. Ethlabs says Glamsterdam aims to increase the block gas limit from 60 million to 200 million. Gas measures the work transactions use; the proposed changes would also alter how that work is priced and accounted for.
When a Failed Call Becomes Permanent
EIP-8037 increases the charges for creating persistent blockchain data and adds a separate state-gas reserve. EIP-8038 raises the costs of accessing and changing stored data.
ChainSecurity’s analysis describes how the changes could weaken contracts’ safeguards against deliberately underfunded calls. A contract may catch a failed call and record a permanent failure. With the proposed accounting, returned gas or the separate reserve could allow the failure-handling code to complete when it previously would have run out of gas and rolled back—potentially taking away a user’s ability to retry.
Ethlabs distinguishes ordinary repricing, which it considers necessary for scaling, from accounting changes that have led to unforeseen behavior. It says the risks relate to deploying under Glamsterdam’s current specifications, not to problems that are currently exploitable.
The issue is particularly contentious for immutable contracts, whose code cannot be changed. Curve’s Michael Egorov warned on Nov. 7 that moving ahead with the upgrade in its current form could necessitate an emergency reversal. “I am sure, it can be made without breaking immutable contracts which hold funds,” he wrote.
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View post on XEthlabs says “the onus remains on protocol developers to convince application developers of the safety of the upgrade.” It encourages teams to test their applications against the Foundation’s gas-invariant checklist and report any issues to glamsterdam@ethereum.org, continuing the contract review previously reported by The Defiant.
The Foundation’s published schedule calls for ChainSecurity and Dedaub to issue reports on Nov. 13, an open developer Q&A on Nov. 16, and a discussion of the findings and possible next steps at All Core Developers Execution on Nov. 19.
Source: thedefiant.io. Adapted by NBTC.
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