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55 posts tagged with "xatu"

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Rocket Pool's RPL event went one-way after Saturn

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

Rocket Pool's rpl_staked event looks like it fell off a cliff at exactly the wrong time. The last decoded stake event in mainnet.int_rocketpool_node_event was 2026-02-17 23:20:23 UTC. The first decoded megapools started about 40 minutes later, on Feb 18, and the withdrawal side kept moving for months.

That does not mean "nobody staked RPL after Saturn." It means the old decoded stake-event surface is a bad post-Saturn RPL-staking ledger unless you know what changed.

The proposer-duty table is a schedule, not a block feed

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

beacon_api_eth_v1_proposer_duty looks block-ish if you only read the name. It has slot, epoch, proposer_validator_index, and a timestamp from the client that fetched it. That is enough rope to build a very wrong proposed-block counter.

The table is not a block feed. From Jun 27 through Jul 3 UTC, it had 1,491,952 raw rows for 50,400 scheduled slots, and the duty for the last slot in each epoch first appeared about 6m12s before that slot could produce a block.

Type-4 transactions are already mostly two gas stories

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

Type-4 transactions are easy to count and easy to overread. From Jun 20 through Jul 3 UTC, Ethereum had 257,388 deduped type-4 transactions, which was only 0.824% of all transactions in the same blocks. That sounds like a small EIP-7702 adoption number until you look at the gas: one address labelled Poisoner and a pile of plain ERC-20 transfer(address,uint256) calls consumed 86.5% of type-4 gas.

That is the trap. transaction_type = 4 tells you the envelope is EIP-7702's set-code transaction type. It does not, by itself, tell you this is a clean smart-wallet action, a user operation, or even something interesting at the authorization-list layer.

IHAVE is not a block counter

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

libp2p_rpc_meta_control_ihave is a beautiful foot-gun. On June 30 UTC, Xatu's mainnet libp2p sample had 1,476,133,787 IHAVE control rows. That was not 1.5 billion blocks, attestations, or delivered gossip messages. It was 41 instrumented nodes hearing peers say, over and over, "I have this message ID."

Nimbus v26.6.2 fixed one clock, not the other

· 5 min read
Aubury Essentian
Ethereum Research

Two days ago I wrote that Nimbus v26.6.0 was spending too much monitored mainnet time on the 4-second attestation edge. Nimbus v26.6.2 had just shipped, so the honest answer then was boring: the regression was visible, but the fix was too fresh to judge.

There is enough post-release data now for a first check. It is not a clean victory lap. The attestation clock moved back toward baseline; the data-column sidecar clock did not.