EVM Gazette – January 19, 2026

Issue #19

Highlights

• EIP-7954 (32KB contract code size limit) moves to CFI

• Slither released new versions including CLZ opcode support

• MegaETH open-sourced their stateless validator client

• Mantle completed their Limb hard fork

AllCoreDevs Update

This past ACDE #228, core devs agreed to consider EIP-7954 for inclusion in Glamsterdam. If implemented, this would raise the contract code size limit from 24KB to 32KB.

That aside, a whole host of EIPs were declined for inclusion in Glamsterdam this call, including the following:

• EIP-5920 (PAY opcode)

• EIP-7793 (Conditional Transactions)

• EIP-8051 (Precompile for ML-DSA signature verification)

• EIP-7971 (Hard Limits for Transient Storage)

• EIP-8032 (Size-Based Storage Gas Pricing)

• EIP-7907 (Meter Contract Code Size And Increase Limit)

• EIP-7903 (Remove Initcode Size Limit)

Ethereum News & Discussion

• In a tweet, Vitalik outlined features that he believes Ethereum’s value proposition depends on.

• Geth made an important security release on January 13 to address an issue that could impact node liveness.

• Growthepie shared data about the impact of how blob fee structure changed since Fusaka.

• 8004scan has been updated to the v1 spec of ERC-8004.

• Proposals for the headliner of the next fork Hegotá, are now open and will remain so until February 4.

• bids.pics, a site by Toni Wahrstatter designed to show MEV builder bids, now shows the proposer as well.

• Vitalik tweeted about the importance of the simplification of the Ethereum protocol.

Research Update

• Two-resource metered-gas equations for EIP-8037 by aelowsson

  • A comparative analysis of metered-gas update equations for Ethereum’s EIP-8037—spanning max, average, weighted and Euclidean norm formulations, with symmetric and asymmetric targets—argues that separating state-creation gas from regular gas and tuning nonlinearity and target/limit ratios can preserve scaling, stabilize base-fee dynamics under lopsided demand, and offers multidimensional accounting as a minimal alternative.

• ENS with IBAN Resolvers: Unify settlment layer of DeFi and TradFi by Citrullin

  • A proposed ENS extension attaches verifiable virtual IBANs to ENS domains and uses a hierarchical resolver (global, country, bank) with EIP‑712 verification and an off‑chain “burn and proxy” fallback to enable wallets to treat IBANs as first-class on‑chain routing identifiers, unifying p2p settlement across DeFi and TradFi while raising governance and privacy questions.

• Data-driven analysis on EIP-7907 by CPerezz

  • A data-driven worst-case benchmark of EXTCODESIZE on Geth with caches disabled shows sub-linear but substantial code-read scaling (8.5x time from 0.5KB to 64KB), placing 64KB contracts at roughly the 1-second block budget under 60M gas and supporting a recommendation to raise the max contract size to 64KB without repricing, while deferring decisions on larger sizes (≥128KB) until BALs and ePBS are deployed and cross-client measurements are available.

• Migration Strategies for EOAs under the Quantum Threat: Breakages, and Open Questions by Marcolopeez

  • A concise survey of execution-layer migration strategies to protect Ethereum EOAs against a future cryptographically relevant quantum computer—comparing native post-quantum signatures (with a focus on hash-based schemes), ERC‑4337 account abstraction, native AA (RIP‑7560/EIP‑7701), EIP‑7702 delegation and key‑deactivation variants—while foregrounding practical compatibility breakages (ecrecover-based auth, ERC‑2612 permit/off‑chain signing, tx.origin assumptions, L2 cross‑chain drift) and adversarial/MEV risks during transitions, and inviting community input, measurements, and collaboration alongside emergency hard‑fork contingency planning.

• Trust minimized transaction simulation using state proofs by Sednaoui

  • A trust-minimized wallet simulation framework verifies transaction prestate via Merkle Patricia Trie proofs and unanimous multi-node state-root consensus, then executes locally with REVM to eliminate single-provider reliance, delivering stronger security guarantees than opaque RPC-based simulators while acknowledging trade-offs in availability, prestate completeness, conditional execution/MEV variance, and practical gaps relative to full light clients.

• Using Rateless Coding for DAS by MoritzGrundei

  • A case for replacing fixed-rate codes in data availability sampling with on-demand rateless coding—specifically Random Linear Network Coding—to dramatically lower false negatives and improve decentralization by generating MDS-like samples without storage or dispersal overhead, yielding field-size–bounded failure probabilities and superior repair/dissemination properties compared to Reed–Solomon–based schemes.

• Combining preconfirmations with based rollups for synchronous composability by vbuterin

  • A hybrid rollup design combines low-latency sequenced blocks with slot-ending certificates that enable builders to publish L1-based blocks for brief windows of synchronous L1–L2 composability, achieving near-L1 atomicity and coordination under ePBS-like assumptions while accepting revert-on-L1-reorg risk, timing-sensitive latency gaps, and limited permissionlessness mitigable via forced-inclusion channels.

• Blob Analysis after Fusaka and BPO Updates by leobago

  • An empirical evaluation of Ethereum’s blob throughput post-Fusaka and BPO updates finds persistent underutilization of increased capacity and significantly elevated missed-slot rates at high blob counts (16–21), suggesting heightened reliability risk under heavier load and recommending a moratorium on further capacity increases until high-count miss rates normalize and real demand materializes.

New EIPs/ERCs

• EIP-8125 – Temporary Contract Storage

• ERC-8126 – AI Agent Registration and Verification

• ERC-8127 – Human Readable Token Identifiers

• ERC-8128 – Signed HTTP Requests with Ethereum

Client and Client-Related Updates

• Reth released v1.10.0 and v1.9.4

• Erigon released v3.3.3

• Nethermind released v1.36.0

• go-ethereum released v1.16.8

• mev-boost released v1.11-alpha1

• rbuilder released v1.3.4

Tooling, Languages & Libraries

• Silverback released 0.7.36

• Slither released 0.11.5 and 0.11.4

  • CLZ opcode support

  • Solidity custom storage layout

  • new detector: unindexed-event-address

  • new detector: reentrancy-balance

• Echidna released 2.3.1

• Ape released 0.8.47

• Weasel released v0.4.5

• solx released 0.1.3

• Voltaire released v0.2.12

• Alloy released v1.4.3

• Hardhat released v3.1.4

L2s and EVM Alt-L1s

• MegaETH open-sourced their stateless validator code.

• Mantle completed the Limb hard fork, enabling new compatibility with Ethereum’s Fusaka features.

• The Boundless project is introducing “Boundless for Rollups”, a means for OP-stack rollups to gain fast finality.