week 37 in numbers: gas by the hour, nine pegs, and $429m that never left

the first weekly numbers from my own scripts: base fee by hour of day, the stablecoin pegs on uniswap and curve, and one hour of large transfers where the biggest move was a flash loan.

8 september 2026 · berlin · alina schanz

a weekly habit: the numbers from my own scripts, with the commands next to them, so you can rerun the week and tell me where i am wrong.

gas by hour of day

gasweek11 gasweek as of 8 sep 2026: my newest commit before it was 1b0f12e (8 sep 2026), signed with my key. the code. pulled 50,400 blocks, a week to the block (25,881,970 to 25,932,369), in about two minutes. the base fee of the next block, in gwei:

the shape by hour of day repeats: a factor of four between the night and the american morning. by weekday, saturday and sunday sit at 0.055 to 0.057 gwei, wednesday at 0.107. if your transaction can wait, send it on a weekend night; if it cannot, it costs less than a coffee anyway. the spike to 2.1 gwei lasted a few blocks, the one time all week the fee moved.

nine pegs

stablepeg44 stablepeg as of 8 sep 2026: my newest commit before it was 9e26dbf (8 sep 2026), signed with my key. the code. at block 25,932,370 (11:32 utc): the uniswap v3 spot price against usdc, a short twap from the pool's own observations, and coingecko next to it.

seven of nine sit within fifteen basis points of a dollar, the boring result i want from this table, and two sit outside it. lusd trades at a one percent premium, as it has for long stretches before. frax shows 0.992 on the pool, on the twap and on coingecko, so 0.992 is the price, and a thin pool cannot explain it. the curve 3pool quote for 100,000 usdt into usdc was 99,975.51, a spread of 2.4 basis points; the pool's virtual price stands at 1.0398.

one hour of large transfers

bigmoves55 bigmoves as of 8 sep 2026: my newest commit before it was 2021ca4 (8 sep 2026), signed with my key. the code. over the 300 blocks before 11:32 utc, about an hour, everything above $5m in usdt, usdc, dai, weth and wbtc: 76 lines. the biggest of them:

• 5,474 wbtc ($429m) and $92m usdc in one transaction, out of 0xbbbb…ffcb and back into it within the transaction: a flash loan through morpho blue, which bigmoves tags round trip and folds into one line. four more round trips of $87m to $88m usdc in the same hour, same source.
• 49.5m usdt into a bybit hot wallet, and 39.8m usdt into binance 14. those two are transfers where money changed hands, and together they make a fifth of the flash loan.
• 40m usdc hopping through three unlabeled wallets, one hop per transaction, a few minutes apart, with no name on any of them.

the biggest number in the hour was no move at all: a flash loan's money never leaves, the borrower returns it inside the same block, and a naive scanner prints it as $429m of bitcoin changing hands. bigmoves has folded the two legs into one line since last week. morpho blue is missing from my label list, and only 16 of the 76 lines had a name on at least one side66 from the limits: "transfers: five tokens, a $5m threshold, stablecoins at one dollar.", which shows how short that list is; morpho blue is the next label i add, with a source.

method

gasweek --tz +2 --json --svg week.svg
stablepeg --json
bigmoves --blocks 300 --min-usd 5000000 --json

python 3.10+, standard library, public rpcs. gasweek reads eth_feeHistory in pages of 1,024 blocks and interpolates block times between the first and the last header of each page. stablepeg takes each coin's deepest uniswap v3 pool against usdc, the spot from slot0 and a ten-minute twap from observe(), and asks curve 3pool what 100,000 returns. bigmoves reads erc-20 Transfer logs in windows of 25 blocks and folds money that leaves an address and comes back within the same transaction into one line. the methods page has the details.

sources

• blocks, logs and contract state: a public json-rpc node, publicnode first.
• pools: the uniswap v3 factory and curve 3pool.
• prices: coingecko, as a cross-check on the pegs and for the dollar value of weth and wbtc.
• labels: the 2023 etherscan labels dataset and a short list i keep by hand.

limits

• the base fee is what the chain charges. a sender adds a tip on top, and wallets overestimate it.
• gasweek interpolates block times inside a page of 1,024 blocks, so a block within a minute of an hour's edge can land in the wrong hour.
• one uniswap pool per coin. for dai and the newer coins most of the depth sits on curve and in the maker psm, so this price says little about depth.
• transfers: five tokens, a $5m threshold, stablecoins at one dollar. 60 of the 76 lines have no name on either side.
• a public node lags a block or two, and two runs drift a little. a different picture would be a bug.

revised 21 sep 2026. the three parts now sit under one question, one data line and one method, with sources and limits at the end. every figure is the one from 8 september. none of it is advice. the next week is in week 38.

revised 23 sep 2026. the links to my code now point to the copies on this site, and short notes in the margin say where a figure came from. the figures and the sentences above did not change.