Ethereum's move from a 45 million to 60 million gas limit looked like a coordinated step from a distance. At block grain it was a fight. Across the 7,866 canonical blocks in the network-level ramp, 3,958 took the maximum legal step up and 3,714 took the maximum legal step down.
That is 97.5% of blocks pulling the limit as hard as the protocol allowed, one way or the other.
meta_network_name = 'mainnet' used to look like enough of a chain filter. It is not anymore.
In four complete hours after Xatu widened its execution-peer capture, node_record_execution held 3,075 peer IDs under the mainnet label. 637 of them, 20.72%, reported a genesis hash that was not Ethereum mainnet's. The sample contained 116 distinct genesis values in total.
This is not mainnet suddenly splitting into 116 chains. The label belongs to the observation path; the remote peer's genesis is a separate field.
One transaction called USDT's transfer() function 519 times and emitted 519 Transfer logs. Xatu's canonical_execution_storage_reads table kept four records for USDT's fixed control slots. That looks broken until you read the extractor: this table is a prestate set, not an SLOAD counter.
A state write is not one write.
That sounds obvious if you have stared at Merkle Patricia tries long enough. It still hits differently when you count it block by block.
Across seven complete UTC days, the median Ethereum block made 1,329 logical state writes and rewrote 6,930 MPT nodes.
About 5.26 trie nodes per logical write. Every block. Quietly.
A stale execution peer is not always a node that forgot the latest fork.
Sometimes it is a modern client binary sitting at the mainnet genesis block and politely telling the world it is ready for Homestead.
Across seven complete UTC days, 201 of 1,444 discovered mainnet execution node IDs advertised old fork IDs. 164 of those had the old Frontier fork ID, 0xfc64ec04, with next = 1150000.
That is not "slightly behind."
That is genesis.
Correction, August 19, 2026: The 55.5 GB all-history figure and the 24 GB December excess below were wrong. December's published 61.4 GB already exceeded the claimed all-history total. After xatu-cbt repaired a multi-shard aggregation bug and rebuilt the receipt models, the same fixed month is 42.19 GB and the logical RLP total through March 7 is 1.315 TB. Those bytes are not a measurement of node disk use, so I am also retracting the storage-externality estimate. Read the full correction.
Transaction receipts are one of those parts of Ethereum that node operators silently carry but rarely talk about. Every full node stores every receipt for every transaction ever executed: gas used, status, and — crucially — every event log the transaction emitted. That accumulates fast.
As of March 2026, Ethereum's full receipt history weighs in at 55.5 GB across roughly 430 days of post-Merge data tracked in EthPandaOps' xatu dataset. Growing at about 1.65 GB per day, it's manageable. But in early December, something broke that trend spectacularly.