Tianchi Ma | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Intraday Gas Fee Heterogeneity on Ethereum: Evidence from Operational Firms

Ethereum's EIP-1559 fee mechanism was designed under the assumption of homogeneous, myopic agents responding to a single congestion signal. We examine how this assumption interacts with the heterogeneous demand structure of real-world Ethereum users. Analyzing 62,142 confirmed transactions from seven operational firms across seven industries (January--March 2026), we document significant intraday gas-fee variation: fees peak at hour~12 UTC (7\,AM ET, $\hat{\beta}_{12}=\$0.054$ above the U.S.\ evening baseline, $p<0.001$) and are associated with periods of elevated speculative-arbitrage activity. Operational firms exhibit heterogeneous scheduling responses moderated by transaction deferrability and gas intensity. Residual cost floors, i.e. the gap between observed expenditure and the counterfactual under perfect off-peak scheduling, range from 40.7\% to 92.5\% of actual expenditure, and persist even during the lowest-cost hours ($h\in\{20,21,22,23\}$ UTC, 3--6\,PM ET). We introduce an On-Chain Scheduling Matrix that maps firms to four scheduling regimes as a practical framework for managing gas-fee exposure under the current mechanism.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2025

Observation of non-Hermitian topological disclination states and charge fractionalization

There has been significant interest in exploring topological disclination states, which effectively probe the band topology of the host material beyond the conventional bulk-edge correspondence. While most studies in this area have primarily focused on Hermitian systems, recent theoretical work predicts that non-Hermiticity can drive topological phase transitions and host topological disclination states associated with fractional charge. However, no experimental observations have been reported to date. Here, we report the first experimental observation of topological disclination states in electric circuits, induced solely by gain and loss. Through admittance matrix measurements and eigenstate analysis, we confirm their emergence and compute the corresponding fractional charge. Moreover, the disclination mode profile and localization effect can be directly visualized via monochromatic field excitation. Additionally, we demonstrate the emergence of degenerate zero-energy topological disclination states, devoid of fractional charge, in distinct non-Hermitian geometries. Our findings open the possibility of non-Hermiticity-induced fractional charges in two-dimensional non-Hermitian lattices, which may pave the way for advancements in active topological photonic devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗