2 posts tagged with "opcodes"

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%.