119 posts tagged with "data"

I got one sentence wrong in the post I published earlier today. I wrote that a CoinTool XEN refund did not make its block cheaper because EIP-7778 already kept block gas accounting before refunds. EIP-7778 is scheduled for Glamsterdam, but it is not active on mainnet. Under today's rules, a refund lowers both the user's receipt gas and the gas counted in the block.

Adding the refund back changes the block story quite a lot. In the same 14 complete UTC days, at least 2,405 of 100,388 canonical blocks carried more gas before refunds than their historical gas limit. The worst reached a lower-bound 72.94 million gas against a 60 million limit.

EIP-3298 came back from Stagnant and became Draft on August 19. It removes the storage-clear refund and the current 20% transaction refund cap after EIPs 8037 and 8038, while keeping same-transaction write reversals. I expected the current cap to catch a broad mix of refund-heavy Ethereum calls.

Instead, 895 calls into two XEN batch-minter contracts made 90.9% of the gap between the peak refund counter and the refund that actually reached transaction receipts.

Correction, 24 August 2026: I wrote below that EIP-7778 already kept block gas accounting before refunds and that one CoinTool call did not make its block cheaper. EIP-7778 is scheduled for Glamsterdam, not active on mainnet. Under current rules, refunds lower both receipt gas and the gas counted in the block. The correction and block-level backcast found at least 2,405 recent blocks above their historical gas limits before refunds. The XEN concentration result in this post survives.

EIP-8148 says the rate of validators moving to 0x02 compounding credentials has been very low. That is true if a validator means a key: on the complete UTC day of August 21, 0x02 was 17,780 of 901,667 active indices, or 1.97%. Those keys carried 14.05 million of Ethereum's 42.33 million active effective ETH, or 33.19%.

The draft I called EIP-9999 six hours ago now has a real number: EIP-8390. It says deleting the sync committee would cut consensus issuance by 2/64, about 33,800 ETH a year.

I followed the function it deletes. There is another mint inside it.

Draft EIP-9999 landed yesterday with a clean argument for deleting the sync committee: 512 validators, one seat per 1,761 validators, only 0.06% of the active set. At the start of the current committee period, 901,612 / 512 was 1,760.96. The arithmetic is almost comically exact.

The word "validator" is doing too much work.

Blob transactions have an expensive way to say "same data, higher fee." The transaction hash changes, so the network pulls the whole thing again, including blob content it may already have.

EIP-8094 proposes splitting those pieces apart. I checked the premise against 14 complete days of mainnet mempool observations. Out of 3,427 consecutive same-sender, same-nonce blob fee increases, 3,413 kept the exact same versioned-hash array. That is 99.59%.

A small EIP-8141 text fix landed on Friday. The frame-transaction draft had accidentally priced zero calldata bytes at 16 gas and nonzero bytes at 64; the intended EIP-7976 floor is 64 for both. Execution specs already counted the bytes correctly, so this was not a client fix or a live-network bug.

It did send me back to current mainnet calldata. Across the 14 complete UTC days from August 7 through August 20, one executeBatch target accounts for 30.01 billion of the 67.87 billion added gas in a fixed-path EIP-7976 backcast. That is 44.22% from one address, and 85.7% of the affected calldata bytes sent to it were zero.

A higher-nonce blob transaction can reach every monitored observer before the transaction it must follow. I found 23 of those adjacent-nonce pairs across 14 complete mainnet days. In the slowest pair, the median lead for nonce N+1 was three minutes.

That is the awkward edge case behind EIP-8077. The draft would put sender and nonce into transaction announcements so a peer can spot a future nonce before it fetches the full transaction. All ten monitored observers saw the higher nonce first in only 23 of roughly 97,000 eligible pairs.

EIP-7923 sounded like a repricing for pathological memory users. Then I ran its 100-gas page charge over 34.08 million recent mainnet transactions, holding the historical execution paths fixed. On those paths, it nearly deletes the charge it replaces: no more than 0.52 billion gas instead of 10.35 billion.

That 95% headline is real and a little misleading. Memory expansion was only 0.340% of all transaction gas in the sample, so the minimum fixed-path saving is 0.323% of historical transaction gas. The first free 4 KiB page does most of the work.

Plataberget spent five hours producing block access lists around 24 KiB. A few hours later they had settled near 86 KiB, yet the lists still held roughly the same number of unique addresses and storage keys.

That is the part I did not expect. The devnet pushed almost ten times more gas through each block without adding more transactions or more BAL items. The extra 61 KiB went into the payload hanging off those items.