There's a 3-second cliff in Ethereum's attestation system. Blocks that arrive after it — when validators have already started forming their head votes — cause measurable drops in head accuracy. The earlier post established that with 50,000 slots of data.
What it didn't answer: who's responsible?
I started this looking for evidence that high-MEV blocks are harder for execution clients to process. The intuition is obvious: MEV blocks are full of complex DeFi interactions, sandwich attacks, arbitrage — all the state-thrashing stuff. Surely they're heavier to execute.
They're not. The correlation between MEV block value and newPayload execution time is r = −0.004. Essentially random noise.
What actually predicts execution latency is simpler and more boring: how much gas the block used.
This post mixed protocol payload timestamps with block-arrival timing. In a fixed seven-day reconstruction, consecutive canonical execution timestamps were 12 seconds apart for 50,011 intervals and 24 seconds apart for 194 intervals. The 24-second cases matched 129 missed + 65 orphaned slots; they were not a fuzzy tail of late-arriving blocks. The 52,104-block headline also exceeded the physical ceiling of 50,400 scheduled slots, and the pooled execution-client ranking was not a fixed-cohort benchmark. See the full correction.
Analyzing 52,104 blocks over 7 days: mean interval is 12.05s, median is 12s. Only 0.38% of blocks are delayed beyond 12 seconds. The network maintains remarkably tight timing.
The "Ethereum Virtual Machine" sounds like a computation engine. In practice, looking at 101 blocks of opcode execution data, it spends most of its time doing something much more mundane: reading and writing state.
SSTORE and SLOAD together account for 60.7% of all gas consumed on mainnet. Every other opcode — arithmetic, hashing, control flow, cross-contract calls — splits the remaining 39.3%.
I found a smoking gun in the mempool data: an MEV extraction bot is being systematically excluded from Ethereum blocks with a 91.9% exclusion rate. The kicker? Higher gas prices correlate with higher exclusion rates — the exact opposite of how a functioning market should work.
The Gas Price Paradox: For one sender, excluded transactions offered 11.78 gwei on average. The single transaction that got through? 1.7 gwei. This is reverse price discrimination — the more you pay, the less likely you are to be included.
Analyzing 24 hours of mainnet data: 72.5% of attestations are included in the next slot (optimal), but 27.5% are delayed. These delayed attestations earn reduced rewards.