EVM's Gas Metering Assumption Just Failed—46% of Base Transactions Face Unpredictable Costs

Current gas metering on EVM-compatible blockchains assumes that execution conditions remain stable—that the resource mix is constant enough to collapse costs into a single scalar with fixed relative prices, and that state drift between submission and execution doesn't materially alter outcomes. A new trace-level measurement study by Heimbach, Babel, and Milionis, now on arXiv, puts this assumption to the test. The researchers sampled 3,000 blocks per day from Ethereum L1 and Base throughout 2025, decomposing each transaction into opcode-level execution gas, intrinsic gas, refunds, and persistent state deltas. They also re-executed transactions from September 2025 on older states to measure sensitivity.

The findings show the resource mix is far from stable. On Base, storage reads and compute account for 29.2% and 24.3% of execution gas, while Ethereum devotes 34.9% to storage writes. Ethereum's gas limit doubling during 2025 shifted its profile toward compute-heavier, Base-like patterns. Cold storage reads are more common on Base (49.7% vs 39.6% on Ethereum). Persistent state growth—a permanent cost currently priced as a transient one—reaches 456 GB on Base versus 38 GB on Ethereum. Execution outcomes are equally unstable: gas estimates vary across nearby historical states for 46.0% of transactions on Base (13.9% on Ethereum), with high sensitivity for MEV and DeFi activity. Storage access patterns also diverge across states, complicating parallel execution and limiting the effectiveness of access lists.

The study provides an empirical foundation for multi-dimensional gas metering and explicit pricing of state growth. It shows that state-sensitive execution behavior complicates workload estimation, directly affecting transaction predictability and user experience. For developers and infrastructure providers on Ethereum L1, Base, and other EVM chains, these results underscore the need for gas metering reform to support scaling and reliable fee estimation.