This post makes a compelling case that state is the hardest scaling bottleneck — no magic bullet like ZK-EVMs for execution or PeerDAS for data. Tiered state, temporary storage, and UTXOs are promising long-term directions.
But right now, the base fee sits between 0.09 and 0.6 gwei. At these levels, anyone can grow permanent state for essentially nothing. Address poisoners added 270M+ attempts in January 2026 alone, each creating permanent state entries that every full node must store forever — for fractions of a penny.
EIP-8037 reprices state creation to 131,488 gas per new account at 100M gas limit. EIP-2780 adds a 25,000 gas surcharge for account creation via value transfers. Both are great — but at 0.1 gwei base fee, EIP-8037’s repriced account creation still costs $0.027. That’s not a deterrent at scale.
These long-term state architectures won’t matter much if the current fee market continues to let anyone grow permanent state for free. A minimum base fee floor is the simplest first step — it prices the existing state externality today while these solutions are developed. Blob gas already has a protocol-enforced floor via EIP-7918. Execution gas is the only fee market left without one.
I wrote up a full analysis here: Solving Spam, State Bloat, and Fee Volatility with a Single Parameter