vitalik.eth: Transaction actions vs dependencies and EIP-8141's role in scaling

Vitalik Buterin argues that recent work on transaction formats, including EIP-8141, gives a clearer way to separate transaction "actions" from "dependencies," so the two can be optimized separately. An action is an effect a transaction has, such as a call that sends ETH, while a dependency is a fact that must hold for the transaction to be valid, such as a signature, a Merkle proof of a UTXO, or a ZK-SNARK or STARK. Pure dependencies can be processed once at the mempool layer and potentially replaced with a STARK, and the text says Ethereum's scaling strategy requires making statically analyzable features cheaper than dynamic ones. The article states that over 90% of Ethereum's activity by volume does not need dynamic, flexible execution. It describes a general-purpose transaction type as a natural interface layer for these changes and calls EIP-8141 done well preparation for the next few years of scaling.