EIP-3651: Warm COINBASE

Abstract #

The COINBASE address shall be warm at the start of transaction execution, in accordance with the actual cost of reading that account.

Motivation #

Direct COINBASE payments are becoming increasingly popular because they allow conditional payments, which provide benefits such as implicit cancellation of transactions that would revert. But accessing COINBASE is overpriced; the address is initially cold under the access list framework introduced in EIP-2929. This gas cost mismatch can incentivize alternative payments besides ETH, such as EIP-20, but ETH should be the primary means of paying for transactions on Ethereum.

Specification #

At the start of transaction execution, accessed_addresses shall be initialized to also include the address returned by COINBASE (0x41).

Rationale #

The addresses currently initialized warm are the addresses that should already be loaded at the start of transaction validation. The ORIGIN address is always loaded to check its balance against the gas limit and the gas price. The tx.to address is always loaded to begin execution. The COINBASE address should also be always be loaded because it receives the block reward and the transaction fees.

Backwards Compatibility #

There are no known backward compatibility issues presented by this change.

Security Considerations #

There are no known security considerations introduced by this change.

Copyright #

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.