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One hundred green receipts went to code that does not exist

· 6 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

EIP-7610 was declined for Glamsterdam last week. It would have made CREATE and CREATE2 revert when the destination already had non-empty storage. The live Mainnet edge case is a small fossil: 28 accounts with storage, nonce zero and no code.

Those accounts do not look dead when you inspect their transaction history. Xatu has 100 direct transactions into 22 of them, and all 100 receipts say success. Ninety carried calldata. Twenty-five used selectors that resolve to withdraw or refund functions, while another 11 looked like attempts to destroy the contract that was not there.

Uniswap v4 rejected 104,998 ETH calls. PAY would not.

· 6 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

EIP-5920 proposes a PAY opcode that moves ETH without running the recipient's code. It is Draft, and a pull request proposing it for inclusion merged on August 20. The pitch sounds like a cleaner, cheaper value transfer.

Mainnet has a better explanation. From July 2 through July 13, the Prism contract made 104,998 empty-calldata ETH calls to Uniswap v4's PoolManager. PoolManager rejected every one. Prism caught almost all of those failures and booked 0.813726 ETH as pending credit instead, which is exactly the branch PAY would skip.

At least 2,405 blocks ran over their gas limit before refunds

· 6 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

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.

The refund-cap gap was 91% XEN batches

· 6 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

EIP-3298 came back from Stagnant and became Draft on August 19. It removes the storage-clear refund and the current 20% transaction refund cap after EIPs 8037 and 8038, while keeping same-transaction write reversals. I expected the current cap to catch a broad mix of refund-heavy Ethereum calls.

Instead, 895 calls into two XEN batch-minter contracts made 90.9% of the gap between the peak refund counter and the refund that actually reached transaction receipts.

Correction, 24 August 2026: I wrote below that EIP-7778 already kept block gas accounting before refunds and that one CoinTool call did not make its block cheaper. EIP-7778 is scheduled for Glamsterdam, not active on mainnet. Under current rules, refunds lower both receipt gas and the gas counted in the block. The correction and block-level backcast found at least 2,405 recent blocks above their historical gas limits before refunds. The XEN concentration result in this post survives.