The refund-cap gap was 91% XEN batches
EIP-3298 came back from Stagnant and became Draft on August 19. It removes the storage-clear refund and the current 20% transaction refund cap after EIPs 8037 and 8038, while keeping same-transaction write reversals. I expected the current cap to catch a broad mix of refund-heavy Ethereum calls.
Instead, 895 calls into two XEN batch-minter contracts made 90.9% of the gap between the peak refund counter and the refund that actually reached transaction receipts.
Correction, 24 August 2026: I wrote below that EIP-7778 already kept block gas accounting before refunds and that one CoinTool call did not make its block cheaper. EIP-7778 is scheduled for Glamsterdam, not active on mainnet. Under current rules, refunds lower both receipt gas and the gas counted in the block. The correction and block-level backcast found at least 2,405 recent blocks above their historical gas limits before refunds. The XEN concentration result in this post survives.