I started with the boring version of the question: which MEV-Boost relay has share?

The data immediately refused to answer it cleanly.

I screwed up the June blob chart.

The shape was right. The unit was wrong. I divided blob gas by 786432, which is six blobs' worth of blob gas, then called the result "blobs". That means every number in the post was one-sixth of the actual blob count.

June 3 was not 6,408 blobs. It was 38,445 blobs.

June 18 looked like a new blob demand record.

It was, technically. Ethereum carried 40,822 actual blobs that day, beating June 3's 38,445.

But the record was weirdly hollow. June 18 carried 25% less useful blob payload than June 3, even with more blobs.

I expected the 21-blob blocks to look ugly.

They don't. At least not in the median case.

Correction, 2026-06-19: this post mislabeled six-blob bundle equivalents as blobs. The shape is right, but the y-axis is 6x too low. June 3 was 38,445 actual blobs, not 6,408. I wrote up the correction here: Ethereum's June blob surge was 6x bigger than my chart said.

When Ethereum transitioned to proof-of-stake in 2022, the combination of EIP-1559 burning and reduced issuance made the supply actually deflationary during periods of high activity. You'd see charts showing ETH supply shrinking, treasury posts celebrating "ultrasound money," and a widespread assumption that high network usage would keep issuance in check.

That assumption is dead. The data from the last four months makes it clear.

Every blob you add to a block makes it slightly harder for validators to attest to it on time. This isn't a theoretical concern — it shows up in the data today, at the current limit of 6 blobs per block. When Fulu raises that limit, the cost scales with it.

The mechanism is straightforward. The cost of getting it wrong is less obvious.

Correction, 2026-08-13: Ethereum did not lose finality on March 2. A non-GLOBAL join across distributed ClickHouse tables dropped canonical block matches and mislabelled ordinary slots as orphans. The corrected peak hourly orphan rate is 0.33%, minimum canonical participation is 99.10%, and every epoch in the window remained exactly two epochs behind finality. I retract the zero-participation, three-hour finality-loss, entity-wide-fork, and escalating-incident claims. The full correction reproduces the join bug and cross-checks raw checkpoints.

Something significant happened to Ethereum four days ago, and it's largely flown under the radar.

On March 2, 2026, between roughly 10:24 and 13:00 UTC, the mainnet experienced its most severe consensus disruption since the proof-of-stake transition. Block orphan rates hit 68%. Validator participation collapsed to zero in at least one epoch. The chain stopped finalizing — not for twenty minutes like the May 2023 incident, but for close to three hours.

This is the third network incident in twelve days.

Correction, August 19, 2026: The 55.5 GB all-history figure and the 24 GB December excess below were wrong. December's published 61.4 GB already exceeded the claimed all-history total. After xatu-cbt repaired a multi-shard aggregation bug and rebuilt the receipt models, the same fixed month is 42.19 GB and the logical RLP total through March 7 is 1.315 TB. Those bytes are not a measurement of node disk use, so I am also retracting the storage-externality estimate. Read the full correction.

Transaction receipts are one of those parts of Ethereum that node operators silently carry but rarely talk about. Every full node stores every receipt for every transaction ever executed: gas used, status, and — crucially — every event log the transaction emitted. That accumulates fast.

As of March 2026, Ethereum's full receipt history weighs in at 55.5 GB across roughly 430 days of post-Merge data tracked in EthPandaOps' xatu dataset. Growing at about 1.65 GB per day, it's manageable. But in early December, something broke that trend spectacularly.

Every Ethereum block has the same skeleton: a list of transactions, ordered from position 0 to whatever the builder packed in. Naively, you'd assume position 0 belongs to the highest-paying user — priority fee sorts everything. But that's not what the data shows.

Half of all position-0 transactions pay zero priority fee. And paradoxically, they are the safest transactions in the entire block — reverting at 0.027%. The tail of the block (positions 200-400) reverts 60× more often.