week 38 in numbers: a 6.3-gwei spike, the same two pegs off, and $566m that went in circles

week 38 on ethereum from my own scripts: base fee by hour of day with a 6.3-gwei spike, nine stablecoin pegs, and one hour of large transfers where $566m of round trips never left.

15 september 2026 · berlin · alina schanz

week two of the 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 15 sep 2026: my newest commit before it was 6972ac0 (8 sep 2026), signed with my key. the code. pulled 50,400 blocks, a week to the block (25,932,130 to 25,982,529, tuesday 10:44 utc to tuesday 11:21 utc), in fourteen seconds this time. the base fee of the next block, in gwei:

the median came down from 0.071 to 0.061 gwei and the shape stayed: 04:00 to 17:00 berlin is a factor of 4.5, last week it was 4.2. the max changed: one block hit 6.3 gwei, three times last week's spike, and the half-hour medians touched 3 gwei once, 3.0 gwei on friday around 16:00 berlin. by weekday, saturday and sunday sit at 0.054 and 0.051 gwei and monday at 0.100, the priciest of the seven. a transfer on the busiest monday hour still cost less than a coffee.

nine pegs

stablepeg44 stablepeg as of 15 sep 2026: my newest commit before it was 508f2b9 (8 sep 2026), signed with my key. the code. at block 25,982,530 (11:21 utc): the uniswap v3 spot price against usdc, a ten-minute twap from the pool's own observations, and coingecko next to it.

the same picture as last week, to the third decimal. seven of nine sit within fifteen basis points of a dollar; crvusd and gho are about ten basis points under, where they tend to sit. frax at 0.991 and lusd at 1.009 read the same on the pool, on the twap and on coingecko, and have for weeks. the curve 3pool quote for 100,000 usdt into usdc was 99,970.67, a spread of 2.9 basis points, and 99,984.74 for dai; the pool's virtual price stands at 1.0398.

one hour of large transfers

bigmoves55 bigmoves as of 15 sep 2026: my newest commit before it was cc92c81 (8 sep 2026), signed with my key. the code. over the 300 blocks before 11:21 utc (25,982,236 to 25,982,519), everything above $5m in usdt, usdc, dai, weth and wbtc: 46 lines, 26 of them with a name on at least one side, up from 16 of 76 last week, because morpho blue has a label now. the biggest:

• $98.4m usdc out of morpho blue and back within one transaction: a flash loan, folded into one line.
• 1,009 wbtc ($77.8m) borrowed from morpho blue in a single transaction, walked through three unlabeled wallets (0x6cbe…, 0xa0f1…, 0xb40d…) and returned, four legs in one block with nothing kept.
• the same 9,810.81 weth ($24.4m), borrowed from morpho blue and returned 16 times inside 180 blocks, to two addresses in turn (0x06cf… and 0xd226…): one bot running one loop, $390m of gross volume that never existed as a position.
• $41.0m usdt from binance 14 to binance 15: the exchange moving its own money between its own wallets.
• three fresh mints of $10m usdc each into 0xe69f…, forwarded to 0xee7a… within ten blocks, and $10.0m usdc into circle from an unlabeled wallet: issuance and redemption in the same hour.
• coinbase 10: $7.2m out and $7.1m in, ten blocks apart.

last week's pattern holds at a larger size. the 46 lines add up to $1.05bn of transfers66 from the limits: "transfers: five tokens, a $5m threshold, stablecoins at one dollar.", and $566m of that is 18 round trips, borrowed and returned inside one block, which a naive scanner reports as the largest moves of the hour. the transfers where money changed hands are the exchange shuffle, the mints and the coinbase hops, and together they come to a sixth of the loops.

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, with morpho blue added this week.

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. 20 of the 46 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 15 september. none of it is advice. last week's numbers are in week 37.

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.