4 posts tagged with "receipts"

My March post about Ethereum's December receipt storm contained a dead giveaway. It said all tracked receipt history weighed 55.5 GB, then put December alone at 61.4 GB. One month cannot be larger than all history. I should have stopped there.

The underlying xatu-cbt receipt models were later repaired and re-backfilled. With the same fixed dates, December now comes to 42.19 GB of logical receipt RLP, not 61.4 GB. The model sums to 1.315 TB from August 8, 2015 through March 7, 2026, not 55.5 GB, and neither number is a measurement of node disk usage.

Ethereum's green receipt is a blunt answer to a messy question. Across 14 complete days, 288,119 transactions returned success even though at least one child call errored. Those transactions contained 1,225,260 failed child calls between them, or roughly one mixed result for every 115 successful transactions.

A percentile does not survive being percentiled again. Xatu's hourly receipt-size table has a column labelled p95_receipt_bytes_per_transaction, but on July 10 it never matched the p95 across transactions. The table value was 1.50x to 3.90x higher, with a median ratio of 2.67x across the 24 hourly buckets.

The data was not stale and the transaction denominator was not drifting. Both paths covered the same 2,823,931 canonical transactions. They were simply calculating different statistics under the same name.

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.