TheMonsoon Ledger

Weekly Brief No. 10 ·

Ethereum holds Glamsterdam until contracts broken by its gas changes are fixed

On 6 November the Ethereum Foundation said Glamsterdam will not reach the Hoodi testnet until projects made vulnerable by its gas changes are fixed, and asked every team on Ethereum to check eight assumptions, a call that reaches licensed stablecoins and tokenised funds from Hong Kong and Singapore on mainnet. The HKMA said EnsembleTX now settles tokenised deposits between banks in tokenised central bank money around the clock.

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In the week of 2 November 2026 the Ethereum Foundation said Glamsterdam, Ethereum’s next upgrade, will not reach the Hoodi testnet until projects that its gas changes make vulnerable are fixed, and asked every team on Ethereum to check eight assumptions its code may rely on. Hong Kong’s licensed HKDAP stablecoin and tokenised funds from Hong Kong and Singapore run on Ethereum mainnet. At Hong Kong FinTech Week the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) said EnsembleTX now settles tokenised deposit transactions between banks in tokenised central bank money around the clock, and that regulated stablecoins will soon join its trials.

Glamsterdam’s gas changes and the tokens Hong Kong and Singapore issue on Ethereum

On 6 November the Ethereum Foundation (EF) said that ChainSecurity had found projects that would become vulnerable after Glamsterdam because they rely on invariants that “will be broken by EIP-8037 and EIP-8038”. All Core Devs (ACD), the developers’ coordination call, decided to delay the upgrade and to “not fork Hoodi until the issues are resolved”. Work on Hegotá, the upgrade after Glamsterdam, continues in parallel. The EF has engaged ChainSecurity and Dedaub, alongside its own audits. The post names no affected project and sets no new date for Hoodi or for mainnet. No All Core Devs call was held in the week: the Execution call #249 moved from 5 to 19 November (ethereum/pm #2285).

Both proposals change what Ethereum charges in gas for state, the balances and data the chain stores. EIP-8037 raises the cost of creating state: a new account goes from 25,000 gas to 183,600, and contract code from 200 gas per byte to 1,530. It also moves part of a transaction’s gas into a “state gas reservoir” that the GAS opcode does not report. EIP-8038 raises the cost of reaching existing state: a first access to an account goes from 2,600 gas to 3,000, and a storage write carries a new 10,000 gas surcharge. Both EIPs still show Last Call, with a deadline of 1 November 2026.

The EF’s invariants repository lists the eight assumptions and says: “Most findings we had reference INV-4 and INV-7, so they should probably be checked first.” INV-4 is “A fixed gas amount is enough for the job”. Its example is a hard-coded gas limit that breaks when a first-time recipient gets “a new token balance or a new address”, and it names relayers and signed messages as places to look. INV-7 is “Gas reserves and stipends sized for today are enough”, with the example that “The 2,300 stipend of transfer/send cannot create a storage slot.” Teams that find they are affected are asked to report to [email protected] by email, not in a public issue. ChainSecurity’s analysis of 13 October advises contracts to pass a failed call’s failure up so that the whole operation reverts, and to check fixed gas budgets against every permitted path.

The Pilot Scorecard records these tokens on Ethereum mainnet in the covered markets:

  • Hong Kong: HKDAP, issued by Anchorpoint Financial under HKMA stablecoin issuer licence FRS01, an ERC-20 behind an EIP-1967 proxy that transfers only between wallets an authorised distributor has whitelisted; Hang Seng Investment’s HSGLD tokenised gold ETF class; and the token DigiFT issues on CMBI’s USD money market fund, sold in Singapore.
  • Singapore: FundBridge Capital’s Wellington ULTRA fund, whose ERC-20 units sit behind an upgradeable proxy and are redeemed in the contract itself; DBS’s tokenised structured notes; UBS Asset Management’s tokenised Variable Capital Company money market fund; and OCBC’s GOLDX.

Each of these tokens records a holder’s balance in contract storage, so under EIP-8037 a transfer to a wallet that has never held it pays the higher cost of creating a storage slot. That is the case INV-4 describes. Whether any issuer, distributor or relayer sets a fixed gas limit for such a transfer is not public. The Pilot Scorecard entries record no statement from these issuers on Glamsterdam.

Glamsterdam’s hold is the change control a regulated issuer needs from a public chain. Once live contracts were found at risk, the core developers stopped the testnet fork, opened a private route for affected teams to report through, and engaged two outside firms alongside the EF’s own audits (EF). The release date gave way to the safety of contracts already holding value, which is the order a licensed issuer’s own change process would put them in.

Regulation

EnsembleTX settles around the clock in tokenised central bank money

On 2 November the HKMA said EnsembleTX, the pilot phase of Project Ensemble, now supports “the interbank settlement of tokenised deposit transactions in tokenised Central Bank Money (CeBM) on a 24/7 basis”. Until now that leg settled through the Hong Kong dollar Real Time Gross Settlement system. In its FinTech Week release the same day, the HKMA said Recognised Dealers had completed trial secondary-market trades of tokenised Exchange Fund Bills, and that it “will soon expand the trials to include regulated stablecoins”. Neither release gives volumes or a start date for 24/7 operation. Under the HKMA’s interoperability standard, stablecoins enter EnsembleTX as an asset, and banks settle with each other in central bank money (Regulatory Wire).

SFC innovation pathway for tokenised products

On 2 November Elisa Ng, Executive Director of Investment Products at the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), said in a FinTech Week keynote that the SFC is “introducing an ‘innovation pathway’ that draws on our existing powers”, under which it will consider regulatory flexibility and guidance for controlled pilots of tokenised products (page 3). She said “Tokenised gold ETFs may form the next pilot” of secondary trading on SFC-licensed platforms, after the tokenised money market funds approved on 26 October (page 2). The speech gives no criteria, application process or dates, and names no product. Hang Seng’s HSGLD is the tokenised gold ETF class on the Pilot Scorecard, issued on Ethereum (Regulatory Wire).

Hong Kong passes its CARF bill

On 4 November the Legislative Council passed the Inland Revenue (Amendment) (Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework and Amended Common Reporting Standard) Bill 2026 (government release). The government says “CARF will be implemented in Hong Kong next year”, when relevant service providers start collecting the specified information, and that the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) will exchange it with partner jurisdictions from 2028. The amended Common Reporting Standard takes effect in 2028, with exchanges under it from 2029. The IRD will issue guidance and has set up a dedicated team for enquiries. The IRD’s CARF portal and data schema for returns are not yet published (Regulatory Wire; earlier item).

Pilots

  • HKMA Project Ensemble, Hong Kong: an expand decision and an event review for 2 November. Tokenised deposit banks have grown to 12 and industry pioneers to 20, which use tokenised deposits “for corporate treasury management and tokenised money market fund transactions” (HKMA). The review marks the claim of a live wholesale central bank digital currency issuance as met. Stage stays pilot and scale single, as the HKMA publishes no volumes and still calls EnsembleTX its pilot phase.

On the site

What to watch

  • 12 November: All Core Devs Consensus call #191, with Glamsterdam on the agenda (Ethereum Magicians).
  • 19 November: All Core Devs Execution call #249, moved from 5 November (ethereum/pm #2285).
  • 30 November: comments close on the proposal from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) that licensed stablecoin issuers join the Financial Industry Disputes Resolution Centre (Regulatory Wire; State of Play).
  • 31 December: Hong Kong’s insurer capital rules for crypto assets and licensed stablecoins take effect (State of Play).
  • 1 January 2027: CARF starts in Hong Kong (Regulatory Wire).
  • No date: a new Hoodi date for Glamsterdam, and the ChainSecurity and Dedaub findings (EF).
  • No date: the start of the regulated stablecoin trials in EnsembleTX and the issuers named (HKMA).