3 posts tagged with "contracts"

A contract address can hold ETH before it has bytecode. That sounds like EVM trivia until a gas proposal has to decide whether deploying the code creates a new account or updates one that is already there.

Across 14 complete August days, 8,980 successful code deployments landed on addresses with a positive prestate balance. That was 1.03% of comparable creation frames, and the addresses held 5,989.950758 ETH in total before their deployment transactions began.

Ethereum created 587,445 contracts with non-empty runtime code in the first 14 complete days of August. 537,256 of them repeated runtime bytecode seen in an earlier block inside the same window.

That is 91.5%. The obvious culprit is the usual flood of 45-byte proxies, but those tiny contracts are only half the story. They own the address count; a few thousand large redeployments own the bytes that EIP-8058 is trying to stop charging twice.

I opened the new contract-creation table expecting the usual factory soup: account abstraction wallets, Uniswap pools, NFT leftovers, random deployer spam. XEN was sitting in the middle of it again, quietly copying the same tiny contract over and over.

Not metaphorically tiny. Forty-five bytes.