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An Introductory Study on the Power Consumption Overhead of ERC-4337 Bundlers

Andrei Arusoaie, Claudiu-Nicu Bărbieru, Oana-Otilia Captarencu, Paul-Flavian Diac, Emanuel Onica, Cosmin-Nicolae Vârlan

TL;DR

The paper addresses the energy impact of ERC-4337 bundlers in Ethereum by providing the first empirical estimate of the active power overhead they introduce to an access service. It uses SmartWatts and RAPL-based hardware counters to measure per-process power while running a bundled workload on an Anvil chain node and the Alto bundler, with 100 UserOp bursts and ERC-20 transfers. The study shows that bundler power consumption scales sublinearly with workload, with idle consumption near zero and bursts causing short power spikes that do not strictly track load. The findings have practical implications for the potential co-location of bundlers with regular Ethereum nodes and for energy-aware budgeting, while acknowledging that results come from a single bundler implementation and hardware and that broader comparisons are needed.

Abstract

Ethereum is currently the main blockchain ecosystem providing decentralised trust guarantees for applications ranging from finance to e-government. A common criticism of blockchain networks has been their energy consumption and operational costs. The switch from Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocol to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol has significantly reduced this issue, though concerns remain, especially with network expansions via additional layers. The ERC-4337 standard is a recent proposal that facilitates end-user access to Ethereum-backed applications. It introduces a middleware called a bundler, operated as a third-party service, where part of its operational cost is represented by its power consumption. While bundlers have served over 500 million requests in the past two years, fewer than 15 official bundler providers exist, compared to over 100 regular Ethereum access providers. In this paper, we provide a first look at the active power consumption overhead that a bundler would add to an Ethereum access service. Using SmartWatts, a monitoring system leveraging Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) hardware interfaces, we empirically determine correlations between the bundler workload and its active power consumption.

An Introductory Study on the Power Consumption Overhead of ERC-4337 Bundlers

TL;DR

The paper addresses the energy impact of ERC-4337 bundlers in Ethereum by providing the first empirical estimate of the active power overhead they introduce to an access service. It uses SmartWatts and RAPL-based hardware counters to measure per-process power while running a bundled workload on an Anvil chain node and the Alto bundler, with 100 UserOp bursts and ERC-20 transfers. The study shows that bundler power consumption scales sublinearly with workload, with idle consumption near zero and bursts causing short power spikes that do not strictly track load. The findings have practical implications for the potential co-location of bundlers with regular Ethereum nodes and for energy-aware budgeting, while acknowledging that results come from a single bundler implementation and hardware and that broader comparisons are needed.

Abstract

Ethereum is currently the main blockchain ecosystem providing decentralised trust guarantees for applications ranging from finance to e-government. A common criticism of blockchain networks has been their energy consumption and operational costs. The switch from Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocol to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol has significantly reduced this issue, though concerns remain, especially with network expansions via additional layers. The ERC-4337 standard is a recent proposal that facilitates end-user access to Ethereum-backed applications. It introduces a middleware called a bundler, operated as a third-party service, where part of its operational cost is represented by its power consumption. While bundlers have served over 500 million requests in the past two years, fewer than 15 official bundler providers exist, compared to over 100 regular Ethereum access providers. In this paper, we provide a first look at the active power consumption overhead that a bundler would add to an Ethereum access service. Using SmartWatts, a monitoring system leveraging Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) hardware interfaces, we empirically determine correlations between the bundler workload and its active power consumption.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 9 sections, 4 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. The ERC-4337 transaction path
  4. Using SmartWatts for power consumption estimation
  5. Bundler Pipeline Setup
  6. Transaction Flow Pipeline
  7. Monitoring Setup
  8. Evaluation
  9. Conclusion

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Transaction communication path in ERC-4337
  • Figure 2: Power Consumption Sampling of Bundler, Chain and Global CPU (block frequency at 15s, 100 UserOps bursts, 25ms throttling per UserOp)
  • Figure 3: Power Consumption Sampling of Bundler at Different UserOp Throttling Rates (block frequency at 15s, 100 UserOps bursts)
  • Figure 4: Power Consumption Sampling of Bundler at Different UserOp burst loads (block frequency at 15s, 25ms throttling per UserOp)