Opcode Pricing

Summary

Monad is a highly optimized system that introduces efficiencies across all dimensions - compute, state access, and bandwidth utilization. However, the multiplier relative to legacy EVM systems is not equal across all dimensions. As a result, some opcode gas price changes are needed so that applications can unlock the full potential of the chain.

To minimize the number of gas price changes, rather than adjusting the gas pricing of almost all opcodes down, Monad instead adjusts a few opcode prices up. This has the same relative effect as discounting almost all opcodes.

The following costs are changed:

• Cold access to state
• A few precompiles

All other costs are as on Ethereum; evm.codes is a helpful reference.

note

These changes are covered formally in the Monad Initial Spec Proposal

Why are changes needed?

The EVM's current pricing model needs adaptation to support a high-performance, low-fee regime. The pricing model assigns a weight (gas amount) to each opcode based on perceived costliness to the system, then charges the user only based on the calculated sum of weights. As resource scarcity changes - and especially in the event of a completely new system - those weightings must be revised.

The changes described in this page make the minimal set of adjustments to allow Monad to deliver high performance and low fees, while minimizing disruption to users and protecting the system against DOS attacks.

Cold access cost

To account for the relatively higher cost of state reads from disk when compared to computation in the Monad execution client, the cost for "cold" account and storage access costs changes:

Access Type	Ethereum	Monad
Account	2600	10100
Storage	2100	8100

The following opcodes are impacted because of the differed gas costs:

• Account access: BALANCE, EXTCODESIZE, EXTCODECOPY, EXTCODEHASH, CALL, CALLCODE, DELEGATECALL, STATICCALL, SELFDESTRUCT
• Storage access: SLOAD, SSTORE

note

Gas costs for warm account access (100 gas) and storage access (100 gas) are the same on Monad as on Ethereum.

Precompiles

A few precompiles have been repriced to accurately reflect their relative costs in execution.

Precompile	Address	Ethereum	Monad	Multiplier
ecRecover	0x01	3000	6000	2
ecAdd	0x06	150*	300*	2
ecMul	0x07	6000*	30,000*	5
ecPairing	0x08	45,000*	225,000*	5
blake2f	0x09	$\text{rounds} * 1$	$\text{rounds} * 2$	2
point eval	0x0a	50,000	200,000	4

∗: Per input/operation, as defined in the respective precompile specification