EIP4396 – Time Aware Base Fee Calculation

Last Updated on 28. April 2023 by Martin Schuster

This EIP addresses a critical problem that arises with EIP1559. In EIP1559, blocks were (almost) never full. This allows a miner to add more transactions if he waits longer until a block is created. In PoW and PoS this means that the longer it takes for a block to be created, the more transactions are available and the more gas is used in a block.

Since the miner receives the transaction fees, it has an incentive to add more and more transactions raising the gas used in this block. This results in an increase in the base fee in the next block. But since the next block is rather empty, the base fee decreases again, oscillating around the equilibrium value.

The solution proposed by EIP4396 is to adjust the block gas target by scaling it with the block time. To avoid excess increases, the block gas target is capped at a certain percentage of the block gas limit.