At least 2,405 blocks ran over their gas limit before refunds
· 6 min read
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.