brief - October 22, 2026

Glamsterdam Hoodi Upgrade Postponed

Core developers postponed the October 26th Hoodi activation while investigating EIP-8037 interactions with mainnet contracts.

Happy Thursday, October 22, 2026.

Developers postpone the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet. Aero launched its formal merger of Aerodrome and Velodrome into a single protocol. And Ethereum researchers introduce a draft EIP for decoupled consensus.

Glamsterdam Hoodi Upgrade Postponed

Core developers postponed the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet, which had been scheduled for October 26, 2026, at 17:42:48 UTC (epoch 132,352). Core developers are investigating how EIP-8037 interacts with mainnet smart contracts. Hoodi is the final testnet set to undergo Glamsterdam. A fork date is yet to be announced, but it will likely occur after developers return from Devcon 8 taking place November 3-6, 2026.

Hoodi node and validator operators are advised to roll back both their execution-layer and consensus-layer clients to a prior version. Hoodi node operators can also await new client releases from client teams and install them before Monday. Confirmed new versions include Lodestar v1.50.1 and Besu 26.10.1. The delay pushes the Glamsterdam upgrade on Ethereum mainnet toward a mid-to-late December target.

Decoupled Consensus Draft EIP

Ethereum researchers published a draft proposal for decoupled consensus, which seeks to separate Ethereum’s slot-by-slot chain selection from finality voting. The design uses committee head votes to select an available chain, with recent-vote cutoffs and expiring locks to protect recently confirmed blocks when messages are missing or participation falls. The full validator set would send finality attestations on independently scheduled rounds. A finality-provided frame constrains which blocks the available chain can build on and vote for. The draft targets roughly fourfold faster finality.

The proposal is a consensus-layer-only change with major details to be determined, including committee selection, timing, vote aggregation, incentives, slashing and fork-transition rules. Ethlabs member Barnabé Monnot said the draft proposal is targeted for Ethereum's I* upgrade, alongside EIP-8450, a separate draft proposal to have validators switch to post-quantum-secure signatures.

Aero Launches On Ethereum

Aero launched its formal merger of Aerodrome and Velodrome into a single protocol. The spot DEX is deployed simultaneously across Base, Ethereum mainnet, OP Mainnet, Arc, Ink, Robinhood Chain, and Arbitrum, serving as a unified liquidity layer for the Ethereum ecosystem. Aero features a zero-leak economic model where 100% of pool-level exchange revenue accrues to sAERO holders, while the new Predictive Allocation system replaces traditional epoch-based voting to direct rewards in real time.

The protocol leverages its MetaDEX03 architecture, introducing Metaswaps for cross-chain trading and dynamic fee structures. Existing AERO and VELO positions are also merged into the new AERO and sAERO tokens, with the entire initial supply distributed to legacy communities.

Misc News

Ethereum researchers introduce EIP-8450 for adding a post-quantum public key registry to the beacon state. And a16z Crypto renames to a16z Frontier with a focus on the AI wave.

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