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The proposer-duty table is a schedule, not a block feed

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

beacon_api_eth_v1_proposer_duty looks block-ish if you only read the name. It has slot, epoch, proposer_validator_index, and a timestamp from the client that fetched it. That is enough rope to build a very wrong proposed-block counter.

The table is not a block feed. From Jun 27 through Jul 3 UTC, it had 1,491,952 raw rows for 50,400 scheduled slots, and the duty for the last slot in each epoch first appeared about 6m12s before that slot could produce a block.

The state-size total I used was not the total

· 4 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

I owe this one a correction. In February I wrote that Ethereum was carrying 296 GB of state. That was the value of mainnet.fct_execution_state_size_daily.total_bytes, but it was not the component total I described in the post.

On the same Feb 26 row, the exposed account, account-trie, contract-code, storage, and storage-trie byte columns add up to 430.9 GB. Storage trie bytes alone were 220.8 GB, so my old sentence saying "296 GB total" while also talking about trie bytes as part of that total was internally broken.

Type-4 transactions are already mostly two gas stories

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

Type-4 transactions are easy to count and easy to overread. From Jun 20 through Jul 3 UTC, Ethereum had 257,388 deduped type-4 transactions, which was only 0.824% of all transactions in the same blocks. That sounds like a small EIP-7702 adoption number until you look at the gas: one address labelled Poisoner and a pile of plain ERC-20 transfer(address,uint256) calls consumed 86.5% of type-4 gas.

That is the trap. transaction_type = 4 tells you the envelope is EIP-7702's set-code transaction type. It does not, by itself, tell you this is a clean smart-wallet action, a user operation, or even something interesting at the authorization-list layer.

Teku's QUIC release shows up as an ENR field

· 4 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

Teku 26.7.0 landed with a very specific operational note: QUIC p2p is enabled by default, on UDP port 9001 for IPv4. That is the kind of release-note claim that should leave a mark in the peer records if the release is actually visible on mainnet.

It did, but the shape was not "Ethereum just got QUIC." Most of the consensus ENRs I saw already had a quic port. Teku was the laggard.

IHAVE is not a block counter

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

libp2p_rpc_meta_control_ihave is a beautiful foot-gun. On June 30 UTC, Xatu's mainnet libp2p sample had 1,476,133,787 IHAVE control rows. That was not 1.5 billion blocks, attestations, or delivered gossip messages. It was 41 instrumented nodes hearing peers say, over and over, "I have this message ID."