In this article5 sections
Ethereum‘s final testnet rehearsal for the Glamsterdam hard fork did not go ahead this week after ChainSecurity identified flaws in two gas-scaling Ethereum Improvement Proposals, according to Cointelegraph. The Hoodi testnet run has not been rescheduled.
The bugs centred on EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 and could have disrupted at least 13 DeFi contracts that depend on how gas behaves when a call runs out. Derek Chiang of Eth Labs wrote in a post on X that the problem surfaced minutes before midnight, which sent teams scrambling to handle the fallout, and argued protocol designers should analyse potential breakages far earlier.
Also read: Ethereum Postpones Glamsterdam Hoodi Test After 13 Contracts Flagged
Key facts
- ChainSecurity found the flaws in EIP-8037/8038, putting at least 13 DeFi contracts at risk and leading to cancellation of the Hoodi testnet.
- Researchers from Eth Labs and the Ethereum Foundation independently ran AI agents to scan contracts and then opened a shared GitHub repository as a message board so the agents could coordinate.
- A second board now examines EIP-8198, known as “Quick Slots”, which has been proposed for the later Hegota hard fork.
- Solana’s Alpenglow consensus upgrade went live on mainnet at roughly 1:54 pm UTC Wednesday, cutting finality from about 12.8 seconds to around 150 milliseconds.
- Starknet’s seven-day governance poll closed Thursday with 93.52% of voting power backing research into becoming a post-quantum layer-1, with the network still running as an Ethereum layer-2 for now.
AI tools pulled into the emergency response
Chiang drew a direct comparison to the Hugging Face hack, in which rogue agents used a message board to coordinate attacks, noting that the same structure served the defensive side. He described the exercise as successful enough to justify a follow-on board for EIP-8198.
Outside Ethereum, other networks moved ahead on their own roadmaps. Anza, the Agave developer, said Alpenglow’s first phase, Votor, replaces the existing voting and finalization mechanism with direct validator voting and a certificate-based system, and that the headline transaction count will fall by about 60%. A later phase will add Rotor, a block data-distribution protocol meant to replace Turbine. DeFi activity on Solana has been flat or slightly lower so far.
Also read: Crypto Market Today: Bitcoin Steady Near $83.3K
StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson told CoinPulseHQ that work on a whitepaper began before the weekend, with a draft expected in November. Starknet still needs a separate binding vote before any shift away from Ethereum; its token posted the steepest decline among the top 100 coins this week, down 24.9%.
Security headlines beyond Ethereum
A new site called Steal My Bitcoin hides the key to a wallet worth about $2,000 on a server left unpatched for the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, reachable through a binary named print-flag. At the time of writing it had stayed up for 25 hours without a successful compromise, though heavy traffic and probing took it offline at points. Agencies in the Netherlands, Australia, Japan and Finland had taken websites offline Wednesday as PHP issued emergency patches for two critical flaws that could allow unauthenticated code execution.
Bitcoin Core developer Antoine Poinsot said large language models have made some flaws so easy to rediscover that long disclosure embargoes no longer protect users, and the project is updating its policy accordingly. Separately, Senator Richard Blumenthal asked Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino for records on a reported $6.3 million deal with a marketing company co-founded by former White House crypto adviser Bo Hines; Tether said an external investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Bitcoin traded at $80,549, down 1.2% on the week, while Ether fell 1.9% to $2,343 and the total market cap stood at $2.68 trillion.
Why it matters
The delay puts a schedule risk in front of Ethereum’s next major fork and shows that gas-accounting changes carry downstream effects for DeFi contracts that are hard to catch in review. The use of coordinated AI agents as a defensive tool marks a practical shift in how protocol teams hunt for bugs, and Bitcoin Core’s revised disclosure policy signals that AI-assisted discovery is reshaping security practice across major networks.
JPMorgan’s 2027 long-term assumptions projected a 10% annualized return for Bitcoin, against 7.5% for large-cap US stocks and 5.5% for gold, while saying it does not currently treat Bitcoin as a portfolio diversifier. That is a forecast, not financial advice, and crypto markets remain volatile and uncertain.
What to watch
A new date for the Hoodi testnet once the fork’s second-order effects are modelled, the November whitepaper draft from StarkWare, and whether the second AI agent board turns up issues with Quick Slots ahead of Hegota.
Reported by cointelegraph.com.
Source: Cointelegraph