TLDR Tech / Crypto
The Anatomy of Ethereum's State Access
An analysis of Ethereum's execution layer through block 24,870,000 found that roughly 55% of written storage slots are created once and abandoned, confirming that state growth is driven by accumulation rather than slot recycling. On the read side, the top 1% of accounts captured 96% to 98% of all read accesses since 2022, with stablecoins, DEXs, and block builders dominating that cohort, while 83% to 93% of reads are existence checks rather than value retrievals. Within any 30-day window, only about 3% of live state qualifies as active, a threshold the researchers argue captures economic activity without excess tracking overhead. These access patterns provide empirical grounding for state-tiering proposals, showing that separating dormant from active state could curb unbounded growth without degrading performance for the accounts driving network activity.
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