There's a simulation running on every mainnet block that almost nobody talks about. EthPandaOps built it. It watches every EVM opcode across every transaction and asks a question the current gas price deliberately ignores: what kind of resource is this gas actually paying for?
The answer changes everything about how you think about gas pricing.
Buried in the USDT contract source code is a comment that reads: "additional variables for use if transaction fees ever became necessary." Beneath it: basisPointsRate = 0 and maximumFee = 0. Both initialized to zero. Never changed. The fee mechanism was coded in 2017 in case Tether ever wanted to charge for transfers. They never did.
But the code that reads those variables runs on every USDT transfer. And USDT transfers happen in virtually every Ethereum block.
When people talk about the Ethereum Virtual Machine, they reach for the "world computer" metaphor — a globally shared processor executing smart contract code. That framing implies computation: arithmetic, cryptography, logic. In practice, the EVM spends more than half its gas budget on something far more mundane: reading and writing persistent state.
Every week, roughly 1,440 gigagas of EVM execution passes through the mainnet. More than half — 56.7% — goes to exactly two opcodes.
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%.