EIP-2780 enters Last Call: the flat 21,000-gas cost would be split by actual use

Victoria Shinder08 October 2026, 07:162 min read

A commit merged into the EIPs repository on 6 October moved EIP-2780, Resource-based intrinsic transaction gas, from Review to Last Call, with a last-call deadline of 1 November 2026. The same commit moved EIP-7708, ETH transfers emit a log, to Last Call with the same deadline. Last Call is the final window for objections before a proposal is marked final.

What EIP-2780 changes. Every Ethereum transaction today pays a flat 21,000 gas before it does anything. The proposal, first created in July 2020, replaces that constant with named primitives, each priced to the resource it consumes:

• TX_BASE_COST = 12,000 for the sender: signature recovery, the sender's account access and write, and inclusion in the block.
• COLD_ACCOUNT_ACCESS = 3,000 for touching the recipient, charged at the cold rate every time.
• TX_VALUE_COST = 6,000 for a non-zero value transfer: the recipient's balance write and the EIP-7708 transfer log.

The sum for a plain ETH transfer to an existing account is 21,000 — unchanged. Self-transfers carry no recipient or value charge, and contract creation pays CREATE_ACCESS (12,000) instead.

Who pays more. A transfer that creates a new account pays state gas for the new leaf at runtime — 183,600 at the current cost per state byte, set in EIP-8037 — just as an internal CALL that creates an account already does. Each EIP-7702 authorisation is charged a 7,816-gas base. Calldata and access-list pricing do not change.

Why split it. The authors argue that one flat number charges a zero-value call and an account-creating transfer the same, and that pricing intrinsic cost from the same primitives as the rest of the gas schedule lets future repricings of cold access (EIP-8038) or state bytes (EIP-8037) flow through automatically. State-dependent charges move to runtime, so intrinsic gas stays the only input to the validity check and can be computed without reading state.