Ethereum proposal adds a milli-gas accounting unit to cut metering rounding errors

Serguey Asael Shinder26 October 2026, 15:061 min read

EIP-8053, titled "Milli-gas for High-precision Gas Metering," proposes adding milli-gas — thousandths of a gas unit — as the EVM's internal accounting unit, to reduce rounding errors without changing anything users see. Under the proposal every reference to evm.gas_left is replaced by evm.milli_gas_left, and the top-level frame starts with milli_gas_left set to gas_left times 1,000, where gas_left is the execution budget computed at the start of the transaction. Intrinsic gas, the calldata floor and other transaction-level quantities stay in whole gas. At the end of execution the gas left is rounded down, so gas used is rounded up — the conservative direction. The proposal is written to interact with EIP-8037's execution-gas budget.

What it means

This is plumbing, and that is the point. As the EVM has grown operations whose true cost is a fraction of a gas unit, integer gas forces a rounding decision on every one of them, and those roundings accumulate into real mispricing — charging too much here, too little there, in ways that are invisible until someone builds a precise fee model on top. Keeping a thousand-times-finer counter internally, while exposing only whole gas to users and tools, lets the protocol price operations accurately without asking wallets or block explorers to understand a new unit. Rounding gas-used up rather than down is the right default for a system that must never let a transaction underpay. It is the kind of change that nobody notices when it works, which is the highest compliment a gas-accounting EIP can earn.