Lighthouse v8.4.0-rc.0 lands four days before Hoodi’s Amsterdam fork

Lighthouse tagged v8.4.0-rc.0 at 11:59 UTC on October 22. The Lighthouse release record shows the build signed by Eitan Seri-Levi, GitHub handle eserilev — which left operators roughly four days, five hours, 43 minutes and 48 seconds before Hoodi’s Amsterdam fork fires, calculated from that release timestamp against the activation time documented in Geth v1.17.9’s release notes.

That activation time: block timestamp 1793036568, Monday, October 26, 2026, 17:42:48 UTC.

The RC label means what it says. Stabilization step, broader testing, not a finished release. What the Lighthouse record doesn’t publish is any full change list — no named security patches, no itemized upgrade-related code — so on four days’ notice before a testnet fork, this reads as a compatibility build first and anything broader only if the documents eventually say so.

The Amsterdam fork is an upcoming network upgrade for Ethereum activating first on the Hoodi testnet. Client releases like v8.4.0-rc.0 are how validators prepare for such upgrades, ensuring compatibility before a fork fires. Operators running Lighthouse on Hoodi should treat this RC as the build to test against that October 26 window. No mainnet activation schedule appears in either document, so Hoodi remains the only hard date on the table.

Geth v1.17.9 does publish a few numbers worth keeping separate from Lighthouse’s release. Beyond enabling the Amsterdam fork on Hoodi at the same block timestamp, its release contains changes to the EVM to significantly improve performance. Specifically, a new inlined switch implementation cuts EVM interpreter opcode dispatching by 16%, and moving state-history commits to the background trims roughly 2% offnewPayload latency. Those are Geth’s figures. Attaching them to v8.4.0-rc.0 would be a stretch the available records don’t support.