Mostly empty blobs compress beautifully. PeerDAS's recovery half does not.
Xatu started preserving raw Gossipsub message payloads this morning. In the first two complete hours, I found 448 canonical blob blocks with all 128 column sidecars captured. For the 97 blocks below 25% blob fill, columns 64–127 used 4.42 times as many compressed payload bytes as columns 0–63. The same ratio was only 1.02x for blocks above 75% fill.
I called hundreds of thousands of engine_getBlobsV2 rows proof that some execution-client builds did not support the method. That was too clean. UNSUPPORTED was a label added by the collector, not a status returned by the execution client.
This corrects both The Blob Blindspot and engine_getBlobsV2 is still fragmented. The counts in those posts were real counts of rows carrying that label. The interpretation was wrong.
Ethereum added seven BLS12-381 precompiles in Pectra. In two weeks of fresh call-frame data, five of them were never touched. The other two were called 126 times each, and every call came from the same contract.
That contract was not a staking protocol. It was a small cross-chain bridge minting Wrapped Gonka.
A seven-day freshness filter against Xatu's old blob_sidecar eventstream returned 598 rows. They looked recent only because their event timestamps were in 2033, 2034 and 2040. Every payload and database insertion belonged to July 3, 2025.
This is not Ethereum taking eight years to deliver a blob. Two contributor clocks briefly went feral.
I need to correct a noun I used three weeks ago. I called canonical_execution_balance_reads logical instrumentation for ETH balance reads. The count was real; the thing being counted was not.
These rows are transaction-account prestate records. They are not BALANCE opcodes, repeated balance lookups, or a gas counter.
One transaction called USDT's transfer() function 519 times and emitted 519 Transfer logs. Xatu's canonical_execution_storage_reads table kept four records for USDT's fixed control slots. That looks broken until you read the extractor: this table is a prestate set, not an SLOAD counter.
canonical_beacon_block_attester_slashing stores two attesting-index arrays for every proof. Summing those arrays across mainnet gives 245,290 validator-index positions. The protocol intersected them into 555 overlap positions, covering 554 unique validators. The arrays are evidence, not a validator-slashing counter.
mainnet.fct_data_column_availability_by_slot_blob has both blob_index and probe_count, which makes summing the latter feel safe. It is not. Across 14 complete UTC days, the source slot/column table held 63,597,380 observation units; the blob-level table summed to 335,651,250 probe_count units because it copied each column result once for every blob in the slot.
At 09:15 UTC on July 11, one Tysm observer-peer pair logged 80,749 outbound Gossipsub DropRPC events in 60 seconds. PRUNE controls appeared in 80,164 of those parent RPCs, producing 146,218 child rows across five (fork digest, topic name, encoding) tuples and no peer-exchange entries. Those child rows were not 146,218 peers leaving Ethereum.
engine_newPayload just gained another three and a half months of history. That is useful, but the new line has a seam in it: on March 27, the regular-node sample jumps from six observers and two execution clients to as many as fifteen observers and four clients.
If you plot "fastest client" straight through that seam, Nethermind appears to improve from 47.5% of observed slots to 94.9% in two days. It did not suddenly get twice as fast. Nine more runners walked onto the track.