How to Raise the Gas Limit

This repository is for the validation and replication of results from the How to Raise the Gas Limit blogpost series.

This repository is not intended to be a versatile / polished / well-supported software library. In the future, the reusable portions of this code may be assembled into such a library.

Methodology

Data Collection

On chain data was collected using cryo

The main relevant cryo datasets are blocks, state_diffs, and contracts. Some additional datasets were used for constructing sets of contract labels. This script shows an example of collecting this data.

Node client data was gathered from 1) node client documentation and 2) user reports. These numbers are compiled into this spreadsheet. A csv version of the reth data is saved in the ./data directory.

Data processing

State growth was computed using the state_diffs dataset. State growth was defined as the number of storage slots changing from a zero value to a non-zero value, minus the number of storage slots changing from a non-zero value to a zero value.

• For Figure 2, state growth is computed for each contract and then summed for each hierarchical category.
• For Figure 3, state growth is computed for each contract category for each month of Ethereum's history.

This notebook shows how data was preprocessed, and this notebook shows how figures were generated.

Data visualization

Data was visualized using plotly

Code

Many of the utilities for processing and pipelining the data are gathered into this repository.

Labels

Labels were compiled from many different sources. They are collected on a best effort basis and they do not cover all addresses. If you would like to suggest a correction or improvement to the labels, please file a PR.

Contract addressess were divided into the following 10 categories:

• ERC-20: contracts that have emitted a Transfer(address indexed, address indexed, uint256 indexed)
• ERC-721: contracts that have emitted a Transfer(address indexed, address indexed, uint256 indexed)
• ERC-1155: contract have emitted a TransferSingle(...)
• Infra: infrastructure including multisigs, oracles, domain names, and staking modules
• Bridge: bridges to L2's or other L1's
• Game: games
• Gambling: Explicit gambling protocols
• Scam / Scheme: known scams, MLM schemes, or other protocols of a similar flavor
• Other: everything else, including addresses that could not be identified

Categories were taken to be non-overlapping. A small portion of ERC-20/ERC-721 tokens were categorized under DeFi / DEX instead of the ERC-20 because it is a more specific fit (e.g. Uniswap pools).

The contracts of each protocol were identified using a variety of sources including:

• on chain logs
• protocol documentation websites
• github repos
• search engines
• block explorers
• spreadsheets
• address lists
• tag datasets
• tag databases

Some of the tags are in the state_growth repo, others are in this notebook.