What an ERC-8004 Anchor Costs: Gas Units We Measured, and Why We Will Not Give You a Price

The number

Registering an agent in the identity registry consumed between 183,744 and 200,844 gas, with a mean near 184,750.

Why that is gas units and not money

Gas used is a property of the contract call. The same registration does roughly the same work whatever the market is doing, which is why the spread above is narrow.

A currency figure is a property of a market, and it needs a gas price and an exchange rate, neither of which is ours to assert. Publishing one would be publishing an assumption dressed as a measurement.

Our own contract says n = 8, and it is stale

Our product contract records this measurement across eight anchors. The log says seventeen.

A sample size is a claim, and claims go stale exactly like versions and statuses do. It has been filed. This page supersedes it, and states its own sample so the next reader can check whether this one has aged too.

The failures, published because omitting them would be the flattering choice

The log holds 57 identity-registration events. Seventeen succeeded and forty failed.

Every one of the forty is dated 2026-07-13, and the successes run 2026-07-13, 2026-07-14 and 2026-07-22. There have been no failures since.

That is the shape of a bug that was found and fixed, not of an unreliable system, and the dates are the evidence rather than our reassurance. Publishing only the seventeen successes would have been true and misleading at once, which is the combination this estate exists to avoid.

And the same log confirms two things measured elsewhere

The table contains identity registrations and nothing else. No validation-evidence emissions, no attestation emissions.

That independently confirms, from the data, what configuration reads showed separately: the attestation bridge has never run and the validation registry has nothing to target.

Two different methods agreeing is worth more than either alone, and it is the reason this paragraph exists rather than a second assertion of the same claim.

What the number does and does not tell you

It tells you the work is small and stable, and that anchoring is not a meaningful cost driver at this scale.

It does not tell you what anything costs anywhere else, and it does not tell you what our costs would be at volume, because seventeen anchors is not a load test and this estate does not publish throughput figures.