USDC eats 80% of EIP-8374's backcast
· 7 min read
EIP-8374 looks like bookkeeping: stop deleting warm-access entries when an inner call reverts. Across 14 complete mainnet days, that one rule would have turned at least 169,495 later account accesses from cold to warm. The funny part is where they landed. 136,127 of them, or 80.3%, were calls into the same USDC FiatTokenV2_2 implementation.
This is not a chain-wide gas miracle. The verified address-only saving is 423,737,500 gas, just 0.0139% of the gas used in the window. It does expose a real execution shape hiding behind proxy calls: an inner frame touches an implementation and reverts, then a surviving frame reaches the same implementation and pays the cold surcharge again.