EIP-8038: State-access gas cost update

Increases the gas cost of state-access operations to reflect Ethereum’s larger state

Abstract

This EIP updates the gas cost of state-access operations to reflect Ethereum’s larger state and the consequent slowdown of these operations. It dissects the cost of state-touching operations into three components — access, write, and state creation: the cold access costs (COLD_ACCOUNT_ACCESS, COLD_STORAGE_ACCESS) are raised, explicit write surcharges (ACCOUNT_WRITE, STORAGE_WRITE) are introduced, state-creation costs are left to EIP-8037, and EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY are charged for their second database read.

Motivation

The gas price of accessing state has not been updated for quite some time. EIP-2929 was included in the Berlin fork in March 2021 and raised the costs of state-accessing opcodes. Yet, since then, Ethereum’s state has grown significantly, thus deteriorating the performance of these operations. This proposal further raises state access costs to better align them with the current performance of state access operations, in relation to other operations.

Additionally, EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY have the same access cost as BALANCE and EXTCODEHASH. However, EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY require two database reads - first to load the account object (which includes the nonce, balance, codeHash and storageRoot), and second to collect the required information (the code size and bytecode respectively). Therefore, the access cost of EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY should be higher when compared with the other account read operations.

Specification

Cost components

The gas cost of a state-touching operation is the sum of up to three independent components:

1. Access — the cost of loading an account or storage slot from the database: COLD_ACCOUNT_ACCESS, COLD_STORAGE_ACCESS and WARM_ACCESS, renamed by this EIP from the EIP-2929 parameters. This EIP raises the two cold costs; the EIP-2929 rules that determine whether an access is cold or warm are unchanged.
2. Write — the cost of updating an object that already has a leaf in the state trie, when its value changes: STORAGE_WRITE for a storage slot and ACCOUNT_WRITE for an account’s leaf values (nonce, balance, code hash), both introduced by this EIP. The pre-existing schedule has no standalone constant for this component; it is fused into composites such as GAS_STORAGE_UPDATE (EIP-2200’s SSTORE_RESET_GAS), CALL_VALUE (the Yellow Paper’s G_callvalue) and GAS_CREATE (G_create). The two write surcharges follow different charging disciplines, stated once here and applying everywhere below:
   • STORAGE_WRITE is net-metered within a transaction: it is charged by each SSTORE that moves a slot away from its transaction-start value and credited back by each later SSTORE that restores that value (refund rule 3 below), so a slot that ends the transaction with a changed value pays it exactly once and a slot that ends unchanged pays only access costs, subject to the refund cap.
   • ACCOUNT_WRITE is charged per operation that writes an account’s leaf values. For every operation specified in this EIP there is no per-account tracking and no refund: a value-bearing CALL to the same recipient pays it on each call. (EIP-2780 charges it at most once per authority per transaction when processing EIP-7702 authorizations; that first-write rule is defined there and applies only to authorization processing.)
3. State creation — the cost of adding a new leaf to the state: GAS_STORAGE_SET for a new storage slot and GAS_NEW_ACCOUNT for a new account. This EIP does not reprice these constants; they are repriced by EIP-8037 and charged to its state-gas dimension. This EIP states where the component applies so that each operation’s complete cost is visible in one place.

The sections below specify each operation as a consumer of this model: which access cost applies, whether and when a write surcharge applies, and which state-creation charge accompanies it.

Parameters

Upon activation of this EIP, the following parameters of the gas model are introduced/updated:

(1): 6,700 = CALL_VALUE (the Yellow Paper’s G_callvalue, 9,000) - CALL_STIPEND (G_callstipend, 2,300)

(2): 2,800 = GAS_STORAGE_UPDATE (EIP-2200’s SSTORE_RESET_GAS, 5,000) - GAS_COLD_SLOAD (2,100) - GAS_WARM_ACCESS (100)

(3): 7,000 = GAS_CREATE (the Yellow Paper’s G_create, 32,000) - GAS_NEW_ACCOUNT (G_newaccount, 25,000)

ACCOUNT_WRITE, STORAGE_WRITE and CREATE_ACCESS are new parameters with no pre-existing counterpart; their “Current value” column shows the equivalent cost extracted from the pre-existing composite constants per the footnotes above. The pre-existing schedule is not exactly separable into these components, so these equivalents are approximate: footnote 2 yields the write component of the current warm-case SSTORE charge exactly (2,900 = GAS_WARM_ACCESS + 2,800), while the cold-case charge of 5,000 exceeds the sum of its components by 100; footnote 3 is discussed in the CREATE/CREATE2 section below.

SSTORE pricing

In addition, the SSTORE cost formula is updated. As in EIP-2200, the original value is the slot’s value at the start of the current transaction and the current value is its value just before the SSTORE executes. The complete SSTORE charge is the sum of its three cost components:

1. Access component: COLD_STORAGE_ACCESS or WARM_ACCESS, depending on whether the storage slot is cold or warm.
2. Write component: additionally charge STORAGE_WRITE if the new value is different from the current value and the current value equals the original value (the write moves the slot away from its transaction-start value).
3. State-creation component: additionally charge GAS_STORAGE_SET (per EIP-8037, metered in state-gas) if the original value is zero, the current value is zero, and the new value is non-zero.

Refunds are also updated as follows. Each rule is an adjustment to the transaction’s refund counter and is evaluated on every SSTORE:

1. STORAGE_CLEAR_REFUND is added if the original value is non-zero, the current value is non-zero and the new value is zero (a slot is cleared).
2. STORAGE_CLEAR_REFUND is subtracted if the original value is non-zero, the current value is zero and the new value is non-zero (a slot that was cleared earlier in the same transaction is restored). This reverses the refund granted by rule 1, so that clearing and then restoring a slot within the same transaction is never net-profitable.
3. STORAGE_WRITE is refunded if the new value equals the original value and differs from the current value (a change made earlier in the same transaction is undone, restoring the slot’s transaction-start value).

Rules 2 and 3 mirror the refund accounting of EIP-2200 and EIP-3529 for slots that are modified more than once within a transaction: a STORAGE_WRITE charge or STORAGE_CLEAR_REFUND granted on an earlier SSTORE to the same slot is undone when a later SSTORE returns the slot to its original value. Without these reversals, a round trip such as x → 0 → x would yield a net refund even though the slot ends the transaction unchanged. Net over the whole transaction, a slot that ends at a changed value pays its write and state-creation components exactly once, and a slot that ends at its original value pays only its access costs — in both cases regardless of how often the slot was written, and subject to the refund cap.

These refunds go to the transaction’s refund counter and are capped to 20% of the total gas used by the transaction, as per the current refund mechanism.

The rules for state creation cost charges and refills are addressed in EIP-8037.

Cases and their corresponding costs are detailed in the table below:

Account access pricing

The EIP-2929 rules that determine whether an account access is cold or warm are unchanged; this EIP raises the cold access cost and states explicitly, per operation below, where the write and state-creation components apply.

CALL/CALLCODE

For CALL and CALLCODE operations, CALL_VALUE (the Yellow Paper’s G_callvalue) is redefined as ACCOUNT_WRITE + CALL_STIPEND, where CALL_STIPEND (G_callstipend, 2,300) is unchanged. ACCOUNT_WRITE here prices the write to the recipient’s balance leaf and, per its charging discipline, is paid on every value-transferring call. The state-creation component of a value-transferring call to a dead account (as defined in EIP-161) is GAS_NEW_ACCOUNT, which this EIP does not reprice; it is repriced and metered in state-gas by EIP-8037.

CREATE/CREATE2

CREATE and CREATE2 operations don’t have explicit warm/cold pricing. Instead, the flat GAS_CREATE (the Yellow Paper’s G_create, 32,000) is replaced by CREATE_ACCESS, charged in regular-gas, plus GAS_NEW_ACCOUNT, charged in state-gas (per EIP-8037). CREATE_ACCESS, defined as ACCOUNT_WRITE + COLD_ACCOUNT_ACCESS, is the combined access-and-write component of the deployment; GAS_NEW_ACCOUNT is its state-creation component and is not repriced by this EIP.

Note: this definition does not exactly match the legacy decomposition shown in footnote 3 of the Parameters table (GAS_CREATE - GAS_NEW_ACCOUNT = 7,000). The pre-existing accounting in the protocol is not internally consistent here, and this EIP keeps the discrepancy rather than attempting to reconcile it.

SELFDESTRUCT

For SELFDESTRUCT, an additional charge of ACCOUNT_WRITE is added if a positive balance is sent to a dead account (as defined in EIP-161) — the write component of creating the beneficiary’s leaf. The state-creation component in this same case is GAS_NEW_ACCOUNT, which remains in place alongside the new ACCOUNT_WRITE charge and is metered in state-gas by EIP-8037.

EXT* family update

Besides the current access costs, EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY are charged an additional WARM_ACCESS.

Overview

The cases for account-related operations and their corresponding cost components are summarized in the table below. The state-creation column is charged in state-gas and is not repriced by this EIP (see EIP-8037).

Rationale

Empirical Estimation of Gas Costs

Selecting which Operations to Reprice

The parameters selected for repricing in this EIP were chosen based on the estimated million gas per second (Mgas/s) performance of their respective operations. For this EIP, a performance target of 100 million gas per second is chosen. With this performance target, we will be able to increase the base throughput of the chain by a factor of 5 from our current 20 Mgas/s performance.

Data Collection

The gas costs proposed in this EIP are based on the actual time each execution client takes to run a specific set of benchmarks. Similar to the methodology used in the Gas Cost Estimator project, we generate synthetic blocks that isolate and stress individual EVM operations and use them to derive the various gas parameters.

Concretely, to benchmark a single operation/parameter, different blocks are created by varying the number of times the target operation is executed and by changing the parameter values to the operation. The EEST benchmark suite contains the tests used to generate these blocks.

Then, the Benchmarkoor tool is used to collect the needed metrics. This tool returns the total execution time of the block and the number of times each operation was executed. Each test block is run multiple times on each client to account for variability in execution time.

All benchmarks were run on top of a snapshot with the same size as mainnet in March 2026, so they reflect the current performance of state access operations.

What about differences between client implementations?

Ultimately, we require a single cost model that is independent of the client’s implementation. Although the decision may be different in a specific situation, the general rule is to take the worst client result that cannot be optimized. This means that the worst-performing client on a given operation and resource combination will define the cost of that operation for the entire network. This is the safer and most conservative choice.

Runtime Estimation

To estimate the runtime of a single operation from the total execution time of the corresponding synthetic blocks, a Non-Negative Least Squares Linear Regression is used. This model enforces that all coefficients are non-negative, thus ensuring execution time cannot be negative. The model estimates runtime as a linear combination of:

• Constant term (intercept): Base overhead for executing the test, which includes setup and tear-down time
• Operation count (slope): Number of times the operation is executed in the test. This parameter is the one that allows us to estimate the per-operation runtime.
• Operation-specific parameters (e.g., update): Extra per-operation runtime contributed by an additional, operation-specific binary or numeric input (e.g., whether a CALL is made with value, or whether the SSTORE writes a new value). The update coefficient gives the marginal runtime added per execution for storage writes.

For simple operations (i.e., without additional parameters), the model estimates: runtime = intercept + slope × operation_count

For variable operations, the model estimates: runtime = intercept + slope × operation_count + param1_coef × operation_count × param1 + param2_coef × operation_count × param2 + ...

Independent models are created for each client, operations, and configuration. Only operations and parameters with good model fits (R-squared > 0.5 and p-value < 0.05) are included in the gas cost proposal to ensure the reliability of the estimates.

Glue opcode adjustment

Each benchmark test includes auxiliary “glue” opcodes that scale linearly with the main opcode count. The regression slope captures the combined runtime of both the target opcode and its glue opcodes, so we subtract the estimated glue opcode runtime to isolate the true per-execution cost:

adjusted_slope = slope - sum(ratio_i * glue_runtime_i)

Where, for each glue opcode i:

• ratio_i is the number of executions of glue opcode i per execution of the target opcode in the benchmark test.
• glue_runtime_i is the estimated per-execution runtime of glue opcode i, taken from its own regression model.

Only glue opcodes with a statistically significant fit (p-value < 0.05) are included. The adjusted slope is clipped to a minimum of zero.

Parameter mapping

Each gas parameter is derived from one or more benchmark models by selecting a specific regression coefficient (slope or update) after applying the relevant filters (test name, cache strategy, account mode). The two coefficients correspond directly to the two cost components this EIP prices: the slope measures the cost of loading the object from the database (the access component), while the update coefficient measures the marginal cost of changing its value (the write component). The state-creation component is not estimated from runtime at all — it prices durable state growth rather than execution time — which is why it is derived separately in EIP-8037 and left unchanged here.

For each parameter and client, the worst-case value across all matching model configurations is used. The final proposal takes the worst case across clients.

The following table lists the directly estimated parameters and their mapping to the regression models:

test_sstore_bloated and test_sload_bloated targeted a bespoke contract with a storage size of 10 gigabytes, which is the size of the largest mainnet contract.

Conversion to gas costs

New gas costs are calculated using the same target performance of 100 Mgas/s. The formula used is:

new_gas = (anchor_rate * runtime_ms) / 1000

Where:

• anchor_rate is the target performance expressed in gas per second (e.g., 100_000_000 for a 100 Mgas/s target).
• runtime_ms is the estimated runtime per operation, in milliseconds, taken from the regression models (the adjusted_slope defined above).
• The factor 1000 converts runtime_ms from milliseconds to seconds, so that the product with anchor_rate (gas/second) yields a result in gas units.

Derived parameters are computed from the directly estimated ones:

STORAGE_CLEAR_REFUND         = (STORAGE_WRITE + COLD_STORAGE_ACCESS) * (4800/5000)
ACCESS_LIST_STORAGE_KEY_COST = COLD_STORAGE_ACCESS - WARM_ACCESS
ACCESS_LIST_ADDRESS_COST     = COLD_ACCOUNT_ACCESS - WARM_ACCESS
CREATE_ACCESS                = ACCOUNT_WRITE + COLD_ACCOUNT_ACCESS

The two access-list parameters price the same database load as their cold counterparts, so they are derived from those cold costs. WARM_ACCESS is subtracted because a slot or account named in the access list is already warm when the transaction touches it and is therefore still charged WARM_ACCESS at that point: prepaying via the access list must not cost more in total than taking the cold access. Without the subtraction, an access-list entry that is used exactly once would cost COLD_ACCESS + WARM_ACCESS, making the list strictly more expensive than not using it.

Interaction with EIP-7928

EIP-7928 introduces Block-Level Access Lists, which enable parallel disk reads, parallel transaction validation, and state updates without execution through client optimizations. Our benchmarks already consider these optimization gains by running on clients with the optimizations implemented.

Special case for EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY

Differently from other account read operations, EXTCODESIZE and EXTCODECOPY make two reads to the database. The first read is the same, where the object of the target account is loaded. This object includes the account’s nonce, balance, codeHash and storageRoot. Then, these operations do another read to collect either the code size or the bytecode of the account. This second read is to an already warmed account, and thus we propose to price it as WARM_ACCESS for consistency.

Backwards Compatibility

This is a backwards-incompatible gas repricing that requires a scheduled network upgrade.

Wallet developers and node operators MUST update gas estimation handling to accommodate the new state access cost rules. Specifically:

• Wallets: Wallets using eth_estimateGas MUST be updated to ensure that they correctly account for the updated gas parameters. Failure to do so could result in underestimating gas, leading to failed transactions.
• Node Software: RPC methods such as eth_estimateGas MUST incorporate the updated formula for gas calculation with the new state access cost values.

Users can maintain their usual workflows without modification, as wallet and RPC updates will handle these changes.

Security Considerations

Changing the cost of state access operations could impact the usability of certain applications. More analysis is needed to understand the potential effects on various dApps and user behaviors.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

Citation

Please cite this document as:

Maria Silva (@misilva73), Wei Han Ng (@weiihann), Ansgar Dietrichs (@adietrichs), "EIP-8038: State-access gas cost update [REVIEW]," Ethereum Improvement Proposals, no. 8038, October 2025. Available: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-8038.