One dimension measured against many
A simulation compares a post-Glamsterdam single base fee with EIP-7999 configurations, and finds the baseline permits 288–403 GiB of state growth a year.
3 minEthereum & Layer-2
Whether Ethereum should price its resources separately or keep one base fee for all of them has been argued on first principles for years. A post on Ethereum Research this week does something more useful: it simulates both under identical demand conditions and reports what each permits.
The baseline is a post-Glamsterdam one-dimensional market retaining the transaction floor price of 64 gas per byte specified in EIP-8131 and EIP-8279, with the cost-per-storage-byte parameter from EIP-8037 set to 1530. Two adjusted benchmarks recalibrate that parameter along the lines considered in EIP-8368 and EIP-8372, with the floor price adjusted for different slot-time allocations.
The headline finding is a trade the baseline makes without anyone choosing it. It delivers between 82.0 and 92.6 million execution gas per block while permitting roughly 288 to 403 gibibytes of state growth per year — that is, it constrains execution while leaving state comparatively free.
State growth is the cost that compounds. Execution is paid for in the block that consumes it; state is carried by every node that ever syncs afterwards, which makes an unconstrained state budget a transfer from future operators to present users. The recalibration considered in EIP-8368 restores that budget.
The methodological point deserves as much attention as the numbers: the author states the results are reproducible from a published repository, and the comparison uses the same constructed demand conditions across both mechanisms. Fee market arguments usually founder on incomparable assumptions, and holding demand fixed is what makes this one worth reading.
Retold from Ethereum Research. This is a summary in our own words; follow the link for the original reporting.