3 posts tagged with "opcodes"

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.

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%.