5 posts tagged with "research"

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.

Correction, 2026-07-16: I misclassified these withdrawals. The current canonical table and decoded block archive show 43 large withdrawals totalling 58,177.93 ETH, not 52 and 76,322 ETH. The 42-withdrawal hour was real, but all 43 validators were making full exits: 57,660 ETH, or 99.11% of the total, was their original deposit principal. Pectra also activated on May 7, 2025, not January 25, 2026, and the 1.16% credential-adoption estimate used an invalid row denominator. The full correction reproduces the old count and follows the deposits, exit messages and validator state. I have left the original text below unchanged.

Something unusual happened on February 21, 2026. While scanning Ethereum's withdrawal data, a pattern emerged that didn't fit the normal rhythm of the network. 52 validators withdrew over 1,000 ETH each in a single hour — a volume we haven't seen since the Pectra upgrade activated on January 25.

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.

Block builder win rate is the number everyone tracks. Builder X won 18% of blocks last week. Builder Y's market share is up. But win rate hides something: most of those blocks are worth almost nothing. The real competition isn't for volume. It's for the blocks worth 0.05, 0.2, even 1 ETH in builder payments — the slots that account for a disproportionate share of all MEV value.

Looking at seven days of mainnet MEV-Boost data (~45,000 deduplicated slots), two completely different builder ecosystems are visible.

Correction, 2026-08-13: I grouped a per-observer timing table into 200ms buckets, ran count(), and called the result slots. The old histogram therefore counted 7,438,781 observer rows, roughly 148 rows per corrected block, even though only 50,400 slots physically fit in the seven-day window. Rebuilding from exact canonical block roots at one-block-per-slot grain gives 32,694 / 11,502 / 6,006 blocks in Waves 1/2/3. The three waves and the Wave 2 versus Wave 3 accuracy cliff survive; the old y-axis, ~73,000-slot claim, 10,945 Wave 2 count, and 28× penalty ratio do not. Full correction and queries.

When a validator is chosen to propose a block, it has a choice: publish the moment the block is ready, or wait for MEV-Boost bids to arrive and raise the payout. Most discussions frame this as a binary — you either participate in the timing game or you don't.

The data says it's more complicated. There are three distinct groups, and the middle one has mostly gone unnoticed.