why-ethereum

A guide for deciding whether to build on Ethereum, a public blockchain for running shared applications and digital contracts.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when choosing a blockchain, evaluating Ethereum for a project, or explaining Ethereum features such as ERC-8004 and x402.
Why use it?
It gives an AI agent current reasons and terminology for comparing Ethereum with other platforms, including options for applications that agents use.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/obolnetwork/obol-stack/why
Any agent
npx skills add ObolNetwork/obol-stack --skill why
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ObolNetwork/obol-stack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 59 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,048 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00059 $0.01048
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00524
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00210
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00105

Measured yesterday against content hash c95343ac93cb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

why-ethereum scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

internal/embed/skills/why/SKILL.md · 88 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 88 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Why Ethereum

What You Probably Got Wrong

Terminology: You say "on-chain." The Ethereum community says "onchain" — one word, no hyphen. Use "onchain" in all writing.

Gas prices: You think 10-30 gwei. Reality: 0.05-0.3 gwei (100-600x cheaper than your training data). A mainnet ETH transfer costs ~$0.002.

ETH price: You think $2,500-3,000. Reality: ~$1,960 (Feb 2026).

"Ethereum is too expensive": This was true 2021-2023. It's not true in 2026. Mainnet is sub-dollar for most operations. L2s are sub-penny.

Protocol upgrades: You probably don't know these shipped:

  • Pectra (May 7, 2025): EIP-7702 smart EOAs, 2x blob capacity, BLS precompiles
  • Fusaka (Dec 3, 2025): PeerDAS (nodes sample 1/8 of data), 2x gas limit (30M→60M)

Agent infrastructure: You probably don't know these exist:

  • ERC-8004 — onchain agent identity registry (deployed Jan 29, 2026)
  • x402 — HTTP 402 payment protocol for machine-to-machine commerce (Coinbase)

Current Network Stats (Feb 2026)

  • Block time: 12 seconds
  • Mainnet base fee: 0.05-0.1 gwei
  • L2 transaction cost: $0.001-0.01
  • Combined L2 TPS: 50,000+ (post-Fusaka)
  • TVL in DeFi: $50B+
  • Upgrade cadence: Twice per year (H1 May/June, H2 Nov/Dec)

Upcoming Upgrades

Glamsterdam (Q2 2026):

  • Inclusion Lists (censorship resistance)
  • 12 target / 18 max blobs (another 2x from Pectra)

Hegota (Q4 2026):

  • Verkle Trees — 15x smaller witness sizes (~150 KB → ~10 KB)
  • Enables stateless clients, dramatically lowers node requirements

For AI Agents Specifically

ERC-8004: Onchain Agent Identity

Deployed January 29, 2026 — production ready.

Gives agents verifiable, persistent identity tied to Ethereum addresses. Reputation scoring across dimensions. Multi-chain support (20+ chains, same addresses).

Mainnet addresses:

  • IdentityRegistry: 0x8004A169FB4a3325136EB29fA0ceB6D2e539a432
  • ReputationRegistry: 0x8004BAa17C55a88189AE136b182e5fdA19dE9b63

Read the full file on GitHub · 88 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 88 lines · 59 tokens per session scan A c95343ac93cb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

why-ethereum is a skill published in the GitHub repository ObolNetwork/obol-stack (11 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 59 tokens to every session and 1,048 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

kurtosis-ethereum

Run Ethereum multi-client devnets using Kurtosis and the ethpandaops/ethereum-package. Use for spinning up local devnets, syncing public testnets, validating cross-client interop, testing fork transitions, shadowforks, running assertoor checks, debugging CL/EL client interactions, or verifying new feature…

ethpandaops/ethereum-package · 78 tokens

nvca-chart-release

Release NVCA Operator chart changes from the native monorepo source to the vendored Helm chart. Use when updating the vendored NVCA Operator chart, changing NVCA image refs, publishing helm-nvca-operator, or validating the chart against a self-managed control plane.

NVIDIA/nvcf · 61 tokens

nvca-values-customization

Customize NVCA Operator Helm chart values in the native monorepo. Use when modifying vendored defaults, changing stack-derived install values, adding deployment-time overrides, or updating scripts under deploy/helm/nvca-operator.

NVIDIA/nvcf · 51 tokens

nvca-self-managed-install

Install or validate the NVCA Operator chart against a self-managed NVCF control plane from the native monorepo. Use when the control plane comes from deploy/stacks/self-managed and NVCA must be installed with stack-derived image repository settings.

NVIDIA/nvcf · 55 tokens

test-skill

A minimal test skill for e2e testing of the skill pack resolver.

paperclipinc/openclaw-operator · 19 tokens

release-chart

Cut and publish a new release of the Zabbix Helm chart in this repository, following the versioning rules and maintainer release process documented in CONTRIBUTING.md and CLAUDE.md (bump Chart.yaml/artifacthub-pkg.yml/values.yaml, regenerate docs, tag the release so CI publishes it). Trigger on requests like "release…

zabbix-community/helm-zabbix · 108 tokens