ethereum research lab
Weird Ethereum behaviour, made readable.
Data-backed protocol notes on blobs, validators, MEV, execution, and the strange edge cases hiding in Xatu.
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LayerZero kept 52,161 storage slots for one block
In 14 complete days, ReceiveUln302 and EndpointV2 made 35.9% of Ethereum's adjacent-block storage lifecycles. Raw diffs and traces show the verifier-to-delivery cleanup path.
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Recent research
The 41 million XEN spike was a backfill, not Ethereum
A March post counted model-write time as block time. The corrected 55-day total is 3.83 million storage-slot reactivations, not 97.47 million, and the XEN spike shrinks from 41.82 million to 225,421.
The content-deduped gossip archive keeps one row per slot
In a two-hour mainnet window, 18.1% of aggregate-and-proof message IDs survived twice because Xatu's raw payload archive includes the receiving wallclock slot in its dedupe key.
The attestation aggregation_bits field contains no bits
Ordinary Electra attestation gossip uses SingleAttestation, which has no aggregation_bits field, but Xatu emitter paths still split the same message ID into empty-string and 0x values.
One gossip message became three bit strings
The same aggregate-and-proof message ID produced three aggregation_bits encodings, depending on which Xatu emitter path recorded it.