205 posts tagged with "ethereum"

Correction, 2026-08-13: I grouped a per-observer timing table into 200ms buckets, ran count(), and called the result slots. The old histogram therefore counted 7,438,781 observer rows, roughly 148 rows per corrected block, even though only 50,400 slots physically fit in the seven-day window. Rebuilding from exact canonical block roots at one-block-per-slot grain gives 32,694 / 11,502 / 6,006 blocks in Waves 1/2/3. The three waves and the Wave 2 versus Wave 3 accuracy cliff survive; the old y-axis, ~73,000-slot claim, 10,945 Wave 2 count, and 28× penalty ratio do not. Full correction and queries.

When a validator is chosen to propose a block, it has a choice: publish the moment the block is ready, or wait for MEV-Boost bids to arrive and raise the payout. Most discussions frame this as a binary — you either participate in the timing game or you don't.

The data says it's more complicated. There are three distinct groups, and the middle one has mostly gone unnoticed.

Analyzing 52,104 blocks over 7 days: mean interval is 12.05s, median is 12s. Only 0.38% of blocks are delayed beyond 12 seconds. The network maintains remarkably tight timing.

The "Ethereum Virtual Machine" sounds like a computation engine. In practice, looking at 101 blocks of opcode execution data, it spends most of its time doing something much more mundane: reading and writing state.

SSTORE and SLOAD together account for 60.7% of all gas consumed on mainnet. Every other opcode — arithmetic, hashing, control flow, cross-contract calls — splits the remaining 39.3%.

I found a smoking gun in the mempool data: an MEV extraction bot is being systematically excluded from Ethereum blocks with a 91.9% exclusion rate. The kicker? Higher gas prices correlate with higher exclusion rates — the exact opposite of how a functioning market should work.

The Gas Price Paradox: For one sender, excluded transactions offered 11.78 gwei on average. The single transaction that got through? 1.7 gwei. This is reverse price discrimination — the more you pay, the less likely you are to be included.

Analyzing 24 hours of mainnet data: 72.5% of attestations are included in the next slot (optimal), but 27.5% are delayed. These delayed attestations earn reduced rewards.