EIP-0000 Preferential Gas Costs for Native ETH Operations – Draft for feedback

Discussion topic for Preferential Gas Costs for Native ETH Operations (early draft) Update Log 2026-08-05: Initial draft published External Reviews None as of 2026-08-05. Outstanding Issues Final confirmation of the 0.75 factor by client teams after benchmarking against concurrent state-access changes (e.g. EIP-8038) Whether the factor should also apply to SELFBALANCE and/or CALLVALUE (currently left open) Residual value handling in SELFDESTRUCT (if still relevant) Context This is the second proposal aiming to increase ETH’s role as a “digital reserve currency”. One way to achieve this is to make operations that use native balances structurally cheaper and more convenient than the equivalent operations on other tokens. While simple top-level transfers already enjoy a cost advantage, internal value-bearing calls still pay a significant surcharge (and have no advantage over using any other token). Reducing that friction is intended as a demand-side improvement rather than a change to issuance or staking economics. Proposal Apply a multiplicative factor of 0.75 to: The value-transfer gas component of CALL , CALLCODE , CREATE and CREATE2 when value > 0 The cold and warm access costs of BALANCE The value-transfer component is defined with reference to the Yellow Paper’s G_callvalue and the EIP-8038 decomposition ( ACCOUNT_WRITE + CALL_STIPEND ). Repo (README + both drafts): github.com GitHub - crypDuck/eip-drafts: Be the change you want to see Be the change you want to see Specific draft: github.com/crypDuck/eip-drafts 02-preferential-gas-costs-for-native-eth-operations.md main --- title: Preferential Gas Costs for Native ETH Operations description: Apply a preferential gas factor to the value-transfer component of CALL/CREATE-family opcodes and to BALANCE access costs, reinforcing native ETH as the preferred medium of exchange and unit of account. author: crypDuck discussions-to: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/preferential-gas-costs-for-native-eth-operations-draft-for-feedback/29302 status: Draft type: Standards Track category: Core created: 2026-08-04 requires: 2929, 3529 related: Native ETH as ERC-20 Precompile --- ## Abstract This EIP applies a multiplicative preferential factor to the value-transfer gas component of `CALL`, `CALLCODE`, `CREATE` and `CREATE2` when `value > 0`, and to both the cold and warm access costs of `BALANCE`. The change makes operations that move or query native ETH balances cheaper relative to the same operations on other tokens, reinforcing ETH as the preferred medium of exchange, unit of account, and digital reserve asset. ## Motivation A plain native ETH transfer costs 21 000 gas. A typical ERC-20 transfer costs 45 000–65 000 gas. Balance queries via `BALANCE` are also cheaper than an ERC-20 `balanceOf`. These structural differences already favour native ETH for simple top-level transfers. This file has been truncated. show original Feedback is particularly welcome on the magnitude of the factor, the precise definition of the scaled component, and whether the ultra-cheap context opcodes should also be included. There is a related companion proposal that introduces a native-ETH ERC-20 interface at 0x20 in the same repository ( discussion topic ). 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic