At first glance, Mainnet made 122,453 positive-value transfers from an address to itself in 14 days. That is a silly number. It is also wrong for the question draft EIP-8358 is trying to answer.
EIP-8374 looks like bookkeeping: stop deleting warm-access entries when an inner call reverts. Across 14 complete mainnet days, that one rule would have turned at least 169,495 later account accesses from cold to warm. The funny part is where they landed. 136,127 of them, or 80.3%, were calls into the same USDC FiatTokenV2_2 implementation.
This is not a chain-wide gas miracle. The verified address-only saving is 423,737,500 gas, just 0.0139% of the gas used in the window. It does expose a real execution shape hiding behind proxy calls: an inner frame touches an implementation and reverts, then a surviving frame reaches the same implementation and pays the cold surcharge again.
EIP-7709 came back from the dead last week. The proposal would charge BLOCKHASH for the storage reads it now represents, which sent me looking for contracts that call it hard enough to care. One SHIB airdrop did: 374 transactions into a single contract produced 149,600 calls, or 58.4% of every observed BLOCKHASH execution in a 14-day trace window.
The gas story is stranger than the count. Each airdrop read the same two ancestors 200 times, so most of the proposed storage charges would be warm. Even the cheapest all-warm backcast still pushes 327 of the 374 historical transactions past their original gas limits before their refund becomes usable.
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.
There are 842,000 transactions sitting in the Ethereum mempool right now that have been there for more than 24 hours. Most people assume they're stuck because gas fees went up. That's wrong.
69% of them — 582,000 transactions — are mathematically impossible to include. Not "too expensive to bother with," but literally incapable of being mined at any point in the future at their current pricing.
And inside that group, there's a quieter disaster: 9,436 wallets are in a nonce death lock, where one underpriced transaction from days ago has frozen every subsequent transaction the address ever tried to send.
Ethereum's gas fees are close to zero. Everyone knows that. What's less obvious is what the collapse did to where the fees go — and what it means for EIP-1559's core promise.
In January 2025, for every ETH a user paid in gas, roughly 82% was burned and 18% went to validators as tips. Today it's the opposite: roughly 89% goes to validators and 11% is burned. The ratio didn't shift gradually. It inverted in a single month.
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.
Ethereum's base fee is so low right now — bouncing between 0.025 and 0.97 gwei — that something unexpected has emerged in the mempool: a class of transactions that aren't too cheap to ever be included. They're just cheap enough to wait.
At 0.027 gwei, the median time to inclusion is 2.6 hours. At 0.030 gwei, it's 57 seconds. Three thousandths of a gwei separate an hour of waiting from near-instant inclusion — and whether you wait depends almost entirely on what time UTC it is when you submitted.
Ethereum block execution isn't a fixed-cost operation. For small blocks the state LRU cache handles nearly everything. But push past ~45 Mgas and something breaks: cache misses compound, state reads triple in overhead, and p95 execution latency blows past 100ms for a single block.
Nobody talks about this because mgas/s benchmarks measure throughput — not the hidden cost of cold cache reads. The gas limit doubling from 30M to 60M made this matter.
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.