Exploring Ethereum, One EIP at a Time

WHAT IS AN EIP?

If you’ve spent time building on Ethereum, you’ve probably heard the term EIP being tossed around, often mentioned alonside major upgrades like The merge, Berlin, or Shangai. But what does an EIP actually represent, and why do they matter?

DEFINITION AND PURPOSE

Ethereum Improvement Proposal is a document that proposes change to the Ethereum protocol, whether it is to make the network faster, cheaper or more secure. EIPs provides a structured way for the community to suggest, debate and implement improvements, ensuring transparency, technical rigor and broad consensus. They act as the single source of truth for proposed changes, outlining both the technical specifications and the reasoning behind them. EIPs are essential to Ethereum’s ability to evolve, helping maintain its security, interoperability, and decentralized governance over time.

TYPES OF EIPs

Ethereum Improment Proposals (EIPs) comes in three main categories, each serving three different roles in the ecosystem:

1. Standards Track EIPs: These define changes that impact how Ethereum operates, such as protocol updates, transaction validity rules, or application standards.

2. Informational EIPs: These don’t propose protocol changes but offer guidance, explanations, or best practices. They’re meant to inform rather than enforce, and do not require community consensus.

3. Meta EIPs: Meta proposals suggest changes to the EIP process itself, or broader governance and tooling strategies for Ethereum development. Though they may not alter the protocol directly, they often require community agreement.

HOW EIPs ARE CREATED AND ADOPTED

The EIP process is a collaborative and structured path from idea to implementation. Here is how it works:

1. Idea Stage: At this stage, anyone can propose an idea for improvement. Initial discussions often happen in public forums or developer calls.

2. Draft Stage: Here, the proposer writes a formal EIP using the standard EIP-1 template, and submits it to Ethereum EIPs Github repo. The EIP must incude a clear rationale and technical specification.

3. Review: The EIP author marks the proposal as ready for peer review. Community members and core developers provide feedback and request changes.

4. Last Call: Once feedback has been addressed, the EIP enters a Last Call phase (usually 14 days) for final comments. If no major changes are needed, the proposal moves forward.

5. Final: The EIP is accepted as a standard. Core EIPs require implementation in a hard fork by Ethereum clients, while non-core EIPs may be adopted selectively.

   Other statuses include:

   Stagnant: Inactive for six months or more.

   Withdrawn: The author withdraws the proposal.

   Living: Continually updated, like EIP-1.

EIP 2046: A PRECISION UPGRADE

Now that we understand how EIPs are proposed, reviewed, and adopted, let’s take a closer look at a practical example of a successful EIP: EIP-2046. This particular proposal showcases how a relatively small but meaningful change can have a significant impact on Ethereum’s efficiency and developer experience.

Imagine trying to use a high speed calculator but everytime you press a button, it charges you like you’re lauching a rocket. That is what calling precompiles on Ethereum used to feel like, until EIP 2046 proposed in May 2019 by Alex Beregszaszi showed up to reduce the cost specifically for STATICCALL made to precompiles. That’s it. No new opcodes. No syntax changes. Just an improvement that makes Ethereum faster, leaner, and cheaper where it counts. This upgrade opens the door to a new level of efficiency for smart contracts doing cryptographic operations, verifications, or any high-frequency static work.

STATICCALL OPCODE

EIP-214 authored by Vitalik Buterin and Christian Reitweissner introduced the STATICCALL opcode, which allows contracts to perform read-only operations on other contracts or themselves. This ensures no state-changing instructions are executed within such calls. EIP-2046 builds directly on this foundation. By targeting STATICCALL specifically.

PRECOMPILES

Precompiles are special built-in programs on Ethereum. They're used for tasks like cryptography (for example, checking digital signatures or hashing data). They're written in very efficient code, so they run much faster. To differentiate precompiled contracts from ordinary ones, EIP-1352 authored by Alex Beregszaszi designated the address range. This makes it easy for the EVM to detect when a call is targeting a precompile. This makes it easier to perform conditional behaviors like reduced gas charges in EIP-2046. It ensures clarity and avoids unintentional interactions from contracts or external users.

WHY EIP 2046 WAS PROPOSED

To understand the need for EIP-2046, we have to look back to the Spurious Dragon hard fork in 2016, an important network upgrade that adjusted Ethereum’s gas cost model to better reflect the actual computational and storage effort on the network.

One major change was the increased gas cost for all calls. The reason? Every time a contract was called, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) had to load the called contract’s bytecode from the state, which is computationally expensive. To discourage excessive state access and improve long-term network health, this cost was raised significantly. However, this cost increase was applied uniformly, without making an exception for precompiled contracts.

This mismatch made the use of precompiled contracts unnecessarily expensive, especially for developers building applications that rely on cryptographic operations or signature verification. In some cases, calling these precompiles in loops or batch operations became impractical or prohibitively expensive.

This inefficiency set the stage for EIP-2046, which proposed a targeted fix, which is to reduce the cost of STATICALL to precompiled contracts from 700 gas to just 40 gas, aligning the gas cost with the actual resource consumption and making Ethereum’s built-in functions far more accessible to developers.

REAL-WORLD IMAPCT

Let’s say you're building a zkRollup, a signature verifier, or an NFT contract that needs to validate hundreds of public keys. Before EIP-2046, you would blow through gas limits fast. Using precompiles in a loop? Forget it.But after EIP-2046, you can make 10 times more calls per block, making Ethereum more scalable and performant for cryptography-heavy applications.

CONCLUSION

EIP-2046 is a perfect example of Ethereum’s strength. Focused, well-considered upgrades that deliver value to developers. By reducing the gas cost of a single operation, it revitalized the use of precompiled contracts, making them far more practical for smart contracts, zero-knowledge systems or even identity tools.

It might not grab headlines like major consensus changes, but for developers building at the edge of what Ethereum can do, improvements like this are game-changers.