Author: Shenchao TechFlow
The Ethereum Core Developers meeting (ACD) decided to suspend the upgrade process of the Hoodi testnet, because a security audit firm disclosed that two upcoming Gas improvement proposals would directly overturn the underlying operating assumptions that many deployed smart contracts have long relied on.
The Ethereum Foundation publicly issued a self-inspection warning to the entire industry and jointly launched code audits with multiple institutions, aiming to prevent the hard fork from directly causing on-chain asset protocols to fall into logical anomalies or paralysis.
Underlying Billing Restructuring Shakes the Traditional Logic of State Access
In Ethereum's upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, the EIP-8037 proposal specification and the EIP-8038 proposal specification undertake the key task of repricing the state storage mechanism.
Ethereum's historical state data continues to expand, and the original fixed-consumption model can hardly accurately reflect the real hardware overhead of nodes maintaining state creation and frequent reads. The core goal of these two proposals is to completely decouple the billing methods of state creation and state access, and to reset dynamic weights for specific opcodes.
This underlying overhaul is intended to suppress the trend of disorderly state sprawl across the network, but at the execution layer it directly overturns the system constants that developers assume to be fixed when building applications.
Collapse of Static Gas Assumptions Exposes Eight Invariant Risks
The security firm ChainSecurity official analysis pointed out in testing that a large number of on-chain smart contracts and off-chain infrastructure have long been built on several unexpected static Gas assumptions. Once the billing rules for opcode execution consumption change abruptly, the relevant business logic will be directly interrupted without any warning.
These broken invariants cover the most common engineering patterns in contract development. To prevent reentrancy attacks or control the execution scope, some protocols use hardcoded Gas limits when calling sub-contracts. Rising billing costs will cause cross-contract calls that could originally run smoothly to directly revert because the internal Gas is exhausted.
Other key risks lurk in fault-tolerance logic that relies on exception-catching mechanisms. When the outer caller can no longer accurately predict the inner execution consumption, or when some proxy contracts forward execution remaining based on fixed ratios, the execution path of the entire transaction flow will be completely distorted, and may even cause funds to be locked in unfinished state machine branches.
Governance Team Urgently Halts Fork to Avoid On-Chain Stampede
Facing potential systemic compatibility risks, Ethereum client developers quickly took defensive measures in the latest core coordination process.
According to the review of Ethereum's core governance history in "New Public Chain Nibiru Mainnet Will Launch, Analyzing Its Technical Features and Secure Development Practices," whenever underlying consensus or execution parameters come into irreconcilable conflict with the existing ecosystem, the developer community usually chooses to delay the timetable in exchange for a sufficient security window.
Developers reached a consensus at the ACD meeting that they will absolutely not execute a hard fork on the Hoodi testnet before thoroughly understanding the distribution of potentially affected contracts and providing compatibility guidance. A blind fork not only fails to effectively verify the stability of the new rules, but also easily induces cascading failures in multisig wallets, cross-chain bridges, and decentralized lending protocols.
Foundation Opens Detection Tools to Promote Network-Wide Coordinated Inspection
Because the complexity of decentralized applications is not limited to publicly available on-chain bytecode, but is also deeply nested within proprietary off-chain routing, settlement scripts, and liquidation bots, official audit efforts cannot exhaust the edge-case logic of the entire ecosystem. Ethereum researcher Marius van der Wijden, on behalf of the team, explicitly acknowledged this boundary limitation in the Ethereum Foundation technical announcement.
The Ethereum Foundation has officially published a dedicated inspection repository on the code hosting platform, detailing to the community the technical details of the eight affected invariants and sample problem code. The repository also provides dedicated prompt templates for mainstream audit assistance tools and code scanners, for contract teams, security auditors, and infrastructure maintainers to quickly compare their own business logic.
The Ethereum core developer team and security institutions are scheduled to summarize the first batch of self-inspection data collected from all parties at next week's ACD meeting, at which time they will re-evaluate the activation conditions and plan adjustments for the Hoodi testnet.
