Exploring the Power Consumption of ERC-4337 Bundling on Server Infrastructure

Abstract

The Ethereum ecosystem offers the most widespread support for Decentralised Applications (DApps), with over 120 networks currently documented as using variants of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for core execution logic. The ERC-4337 standard provides convenient access to DApps for users who do not possess the required cryptocurrency or prefer flexible authorisation of DApp actions. The infrastructure for ERC-4337 implementation can be deployed on any EVM network. However, to aggregate user requests and submit them to the EVM network, ERC-4337 requires operating a bundler, an additional component. Recently, the potential use of ERC-4337 was boosted by another standard, EIP-7702, which can enable ERC-4337 utility for any existing user account. However, the use of the combined EIP-7702/ERC-4337 pattern remains considerably low at less than 6% of EIP-7702 activity. We believe that this underutilisation is at least partly caused by the low number of existing bundling services and their popularity, currently fewer than 15 publicly documented. Expanding the number of bundler nodes would benefit the ecosystem but would introduce operational costs, part of which is represented by the added nodes' power consumption. In this paper, we provide a thorough view of the bundling power consumption aspect using server-grade infrastructure, evaluating both CPU and RAM consumption, as well as the overhead of container-based deployments specific to production environments.