2 posts tagged with "blocks"

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.

When Pectra activated on May 7, 2025, it quietly did something nobody was talking about: it cut the consensus-layer overhead in every beacon block by 66%. Attestations shrank from ~35 KB to ~12 KB per block overnight. Clean. Measurable. Effective.

Two months later, the gas limit increase to 45M erased the entire saving. By November, when the limit hit 60M, blocks were 40% larger than they'd ever been.

The optimization worked perfectly. It just didn't matter.