Correction, 2026-07-20: The 55-day counts and the XEN spike in this post are wrong. I counted the full history of int_storage_slot_reactivation_12m, then used updated_date_time (the model task's write time) as if it were block time. Restricting canonical execution blocks to Dec 18-Feb 11 gives 3,833,522 reactivation rows, not 97,466,839; XEN accounts for 2,142,144, not 48,302,239. The Dec 20-22 XEN count is 225,421, not 41,816,729. I retract the 7.5% and 47% extrapolations, the 570x spike, the 41-million-witness scenario, the maturity-convergence mechanism, and the 195x threshold claim. The threshold direction survives, but at 13.0x: full correction.
State expiry has been one of Ethereum's most discussed, least implemented scaling ideas. The core promise: stop nodes from having to hold 1.3 billion dormant storage slots that haven't been touched in over a year. Just expire them. Make clients store a proof if they ever need to resurrect one.
The problem is nobody had measured how often "dead" state actually comes back to life.
I tracked every storage slot reactivation on mainnet — slots that had been dormant for at least 12 months before being accessed again — across a 55-day window from December 18, 2025 to February 11, 2026. The results are stranger than expected.