I called 38.6% of Ethereum gas a permanent-storage bill in February. That sentence was wrong. The table was a research allocation model, not a meter attached to physical state growth, and a quarter of the SSTORE gas it put in state_growth came from transactions that added no net-new storage slot at all.
Ethereum added seven BLS12-381 precompiles in Pectra. In two weeks of fresh call-frame data, five of them were never touched. The other two were called 126 times each, and every call came from the same contract.
That contract was not a staking protocol. It was a small cross-chain bridge minting Wrapped Gonka.
A lot of Ethereum code still says SELFDESTRUCT.
That word is now a trap.
After EIP-6780, SELFDESTRUCT only deletes code and storage when the contract was created in the same transaction. Older contracts can still send their ETH balance to a beneficiary, but the account does not get wiped.
So I checked how often the opcode is still real deletion.
Correction, 2026-07-17: I treated a research allocation model as a physical state-growth meter. That was wrong. The model puts every residual SSTORE charge into
gas_state_growth; in the cited block range, 25.0% of that assigned gas came from transactions with no net-new final storage slot. The current tables also expose unsigned-wrap rows that make the broad resource percentages unsafe. I am retracting the 38.6% permanent-storage headline rather than inventing a replacement. The full source and storage-diff audit is here.
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.
Correction, 2026-07-16:
canonical_execution_storage_readsis a transaction-slot prestate set, not an SLOAD or repeated-read counter. The fixed USDT slots really were present across the sampled transactions, but the table cannot support the claims of five million SLOAD executions, 6,300 gas per transfer or 2.7 billion gas per day. I am retracting those operation and gas estimates. The source audit and 519-transfer batch check are here. The original text remains below for the record.
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%.