Author: Deep Tide TechFlow

The Ethereum core developer meeting (ACD) has decided to postpone the upgrade process for the Hoodi test network because security auditing agencies disclosed that two upcoming Gas improvement proposals will directly overturn the underlying operational assumptions relied on by many deployed smart contracts for a long time.

The Ethereum Foundation has publicly issued a self-inspection warning to the entire industry and has collaborated with multiple institutions to conduct code audits, aiming to prevent hard forks from directly causing asset protocols on the chain to fall into logical abnormalities or paralysis.

Underlying Billing Reconstruction Shakes Traditional Logic for State Access

In the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade for Ethereum, the EIP-8037 proposal specification and the EIP-8038 proposal specification are tasked with the key responsibility of re-pricing the state storage mechanism.

The historical state data of Ethereum continues to expand, and the original fixed consumption model fails to accurately reflect the true hardware costs of node maintenance for state creation and frequent reading. The core goal of these two proposals is to completely decouple the billing methods for state creation and state access, resetting dynamic weights for specific operation codes.

This underlying transformation aims to suppress the trend of unordered proliferation of states across the entire network, but it directly disrupts the constant system parameters that developers implicitly assume when building applications at the execution layer.

Static Gas Assumption Breakdown Exposes Eight Invariance Risks

The security agency ChainSecurity official analysis pointed out in testing that many on-chain smart contracts and off-chain infrastructure have long been built on several unexpected static Gas assumptions. Once the billing rules for the operation code execution consumption change suddenly, the related business logic will be interrupted without warning.

These broken invariants cover the most common engineering patterns in contract development. Some protocols adopt hard-coded Gas limits when calling subcontracts to prevent reentrancy attacks or control execution ranges, and the increase in billing will cause cross-contract calls that could have run smoothly to roll back due to internal Gas exhaustion.

Other critical risks lurk in fault-tolerant logic that relies on exception capture mechanisms. When outer callers can no longer accurately predict inner execution consumption, or certain proxy contracts forward execution remains based on a fixed ratio, the entire transaction flow will be completely distorted, potentially locking funds in unfinished state machine branches.

Governance Team Urgently Halts Forks to Avoid On-Chain Cascading Failures

In the face of potential systemic compatibility risks, Ethereum client developers quickly took defensive measures in the latest core coordination process.

According to the analysis of the Ethereum core governance process in the article titled New Public Chain Nibiru Mainnet Will Go Live, Analyzing Its Technical Features and Security Development Practices, whenever there are irreconcilable conflicts between underlying consensus or execution parameters and the existing ecosystem, the developer community typically chooses to delay the timeline in exchange for sufficient security windows.

Developers reached a consensus at the ACD meeting to absolutely not execute a hard fork on the Hoodi test network until a thorough understanding of the distribution of potentially affected contracts is achieved and compatibility guidance is provided. Blind forks not only fail to effectively verify the stability of new rules but can easily trigger cascading failures in multi-signature wallets, cross-chain bridges, and decentralized lending protocols.

Foundation Opens Detection Tools to Promote Network-Wide Inspection

Due to the complexity of decentralized applications, which is not limited to public on-chain bytecode but is deeply nested within proprietary off-chain routing, settlement scripts, and liquidation bots, official auditing resources cannot exhaustively cover all corner logic of the entire ecosystem. Ethereum researcher Marius van der Wijden, representing the team, explicitly acknowledged this boundary limitation in the Ethereum Foundation technical announcement.

The Ethereum Foundation has officially opened a dedicated inspection repository on the code hosting platform, detailing the impacted eight invariant technical details and problem code samples for the community. This repository also provides exclusive prompt word templates for mainstream auditing auxiliary tools and code scanners, allowing contract teams, security auditors, and infrastructure maintainers to quickly compare their own business logic.

The Ethereum core developer team and security agencies will compile the first batch of self-inspection data collected from various parties at next week's ACD meeting, where they will reevaluate the activation conditions and adjustment plans for the Hoodi test network.