Gas refunds for clearing storage slots help with state bloat but also distort block gas accounting, making blocks look less resource-intensive than they really are. Here’s why that’s a problem, and how EIP-7778 fixes it: The tldr in this thread👇

2/ Today, setting a storage slot to zero via SSTORE earns you a refund (up to 20% of gas used). That refund reduces both your tx.gasUsed AND the block’s total gasUsed. Good for users but hides the block’s true work. The problem gets worse with increasing gas limits.

3/ This mechanism lets refunds from one tx fund the next, cascading until the refund goes below 21k gas. As a result, blocks can perform ~125% of the block gas limit in actual work.

4/ EIP-7778 proposes a simple change to not apply refunds against the block's gas used. Nothing changes for users, impact on block packing is negligible (the avg. number of refunds is low). For more info, check out the EIP: