Skip to main content

119 posts tagged with "data"

View All Tags

The block after an empty slot earns 74% more attestation reward

· 6 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

Missing a block does not make its attestations disappear. They turn up one slot later, and the next proposer gets paid for including both cohorts.

Across 30 complete mainnet days, a regular canonical block earned a median 0.048761995 ETH from included attestations. A block after exactly one slot without a canonical block earned 0.084636038 ETH, or 73.57% more. That gap showed up on all 30 days, not in one ugly incident window.

EIP-8367's 64 ETH ceiling is already underwater

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

A draft proposal to sunset Ethereum's old BLS withdrawal credentials starts from a neat premise: set the initial balance ceiling at 64 ETH, safely above every affected validator, then lower it gradually. Mainnet has already broken that premise. Six active 0x00 validators now hold more than 64 ETH, with a combined 31.31 ETH above the proposed cap.

Ethereum did not lose finality on March 2

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

In March I wrote that Ethereum lost finality for roughly two and a half hours. It did not. The query behind that post mislabelled ordinary canonical blocks as orphans because a non-GLOBAL join ran against distributed ClickHouse tables.

The corrected March 2 peak is 0.33% orphaning, not 68.5%. Minimum canonical attestation participation was 99.10%, not 0%. The finalized checkpoint stayed exactly two epochs behind throughout the claimed incident, which is normal.

EIP-8363's gentle transition is already a 16% reward cut

· 4 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

EIP-8363 arrived in the EIPs repository yesterday with a cushion: double the base reward factor at activation, then decay it back to today's value over 18 months. That sounds like a gentle start. At Ethereum's current active effective balance, it is already a 16.0% cut to the net consensus reward curve.

The reason is simple. The proposal doubles gross duty rewards, but it also burns 58.0% of each doubled reward. A fully performing duty nets 84.0% of what the current curve pays.

PUBLISH_MESSAGE fires before libp2p decides not to publish

· 4 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

PUBLISH_MESSAGE sounds like proof that a message went onto the wire. It is not. Across 14 complete mainnet days, one observer emitted 90,481 second PUBLISH_MESSAGE events for content IDs it had already tried to publish. Every repeated ID appeared exactly twice.

Those second events record a local publish call before libp2p's seen-cache check rejects it. They are not network retransmissions.

Base's delayed safe head came with more L1 transactions, not fewer

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

Base's July 28 incident said its safe head was delayed and batch submission was in partial outage. I expected a smaller version of the June chain-stall signature: the L1 batch sender going quiet. Instead, Base landed 260 canonical blob transactions carrying 1,554 blobs during the exact 2h02m status window, more than in either equal-length window beside it.

LayerZero kept 52,161 storage slots for one block

· 6 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

I expected Ethereum's shortest-lived storage to be token-account churn: balances created, spent, and gone. USDC and USDT do show up, but neither contract was first. LayerZero's ReceiveUln302 created 52,161 storage slots and deleted them in the next execution block.

Its EndpointV2 added another 24,163. Together, those two contracts made 76,324 of Ethereum's 212,618 adjacent-block storage lifecycles, or 35.90%, across 14 complete days. This was not random garbage. It was a cross-chain message waiting room being filled, checked, moved, and cleared.

The 41 million XEN spike was a backfill, not Ethereum

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

I went back to March's zombie-state post because its biggest number had started to smell wrong. Forty-one million XEN storage slots supposedly woke up in three days, then almost nothing. That was not an Ethereum event. It was a model backfill that I mistook for block time.

The corrected 55-day count is 3,833,522 reactivation rows, not 97,466,839. XEN accounts for 2,142,144, not 48,302,239. The alleged Dec 20-22 spike is 225,421 XEN rows, not 41,816,729.