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EIP-2046: Reduced gas cost for static calls made to precompiles

🚧 StagnantCore

Stagnant

This EIP has had no recent activity for at least 6 months, and has automatically been marked as stagnant. This EIP should not be used in production.

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AuthorsAlex Beregszaszi (@axic)
Created2019-05-17

Simple Summary ​

This change reduces the gas cost of using precompiled contracts.

Abstract ​

Reduce the base gas cost of calling precompiles using STATICCALL from 700 to 40. This should allow more efficient use of precompiles as well as precompiles with a total cost below 700.

Motivation ​

The Spurious Dragon hard fork increased the cost of calls significantly to account for loading contract code from the state without making an exception for precompiles, whose "code" is always loaded.

This made use of certain precompiles impractical.

FIXME: extend this with recent reasoning about ECC repricings.

Specification ​

After block HF the STATICCALL (0xfa) instruction charges different basic gas cost (Gcall in Yellow Paper's notation) depending on the destination address provided:

  • for precompiles (address range as per EIP-1352) the cost is 40
  • for every other address the cost remains unchanged (700)

Rationale ​

Only the STATICCALL instruction was changed to reduce the impact of the change. This should not be a limiting factor, given precompiles (currently) do not have a state and cannot change the state. However, contracts created and deployed before Byzantium likely will not use STATICCALL and as a result this change will not reduce their costs.

Contrary to EIP-1109 gas reduction to 0 is not proposed. The cost 40 is kept as a cost representing the context switching needed.

Backwards Compatibility ​

This EIP should be backwards compatible. The only effect is that the cost is reduced. Since the cost is not reduced to zero, it should not be possible for a malicious proxy contract, when deployed before the HF, to do any state changing operation.

Test Cases ​

TBA

Implementation ​

TBA

References ​

This has been previously suggested as part of EIP-1109 and EIP-1231. However EIP-1109 was later changed to a very different approach. The author has suggested to change EIP-1109.

Acknowledgements ​

Jordi Baylina (@jbaylina) and Matthew Di Ferrante (@mattdf) who have proposed this before.

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

Citation

Please cite this document as:

Alex Beregszaszi, "EIP-2046: Reduced gas cost for static calls made to precompiles[DRAFT]," Ethereum Improvement Proposals, no. 2046, 2019. [Online serial]. Available: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2046.