Stylus Benchmarks

This code repository aims to benchmark the gas costs between EVM and Stylus contracts for ERC20 tokens and Ed25519 signature recovery.

# Required to run the examples
git submodule update --init --recursive

Findings

Each contract project directory ({erc20,ed25519}-{stylus,solidity}) contains a Justfile which reads a local .env (use the provided .env.local templates). Read the Justfiles to read more on what targets they provide.

Note

For the TLDR, jump to the conclusion

Important

The provided numbers below are L2_GAS gas costs, because that's what's most important, since it represents the actual computational cost of the transactions, and not the L1 calldata fees that are always fluctuating.

Feel free to check the transactions on arbiscan (the gas numbers are links that take you directly there) to check the gas costs for yourself.

ERC20

Function	Stylus L2 Gas	Solidity L2 Gas	Difference (L2)	% Difference
deploy	2'868'817 + 2'941'842	530'643	+2'338'174	995.0% more
mint	87'649	68'455	+19'194	28.0% more
transfer	70'949	51'332	+19'617	38.2% more

Note

OpenZeppelin was used for the Solidity ERC20

this was used for the Stylus ERC20

Ed25519

Function	Stylus L2 Gas	Solidity L2 Gas	Difference (L2)	% Difference
deploy	3'934'896 + 3'123'366	2'814'629	+1'120'267	39.8% more
verify	225'427	904'435	-679'008	75% less

Note

this was used for the Solidity Ed25519

this was used for the Stylus Ed25519

Conclusion

• For ERC-20 contracts:
  • Stylus deploy costs ~11 times more gas than Solidity (can be optimised through Cache Manager)
  • while mint and transfer are also ~28% and ~38% more expensive, respectively

This is somewhat expected, since ERC-20 contracts aren't computationally heavy (no taking advantage of Stylus).

• For Ed25519 contracts:
  • Stylus deploy costs ~40% more gas than Solidity (can be optimised through Cache Manager)
  • but for signature verification, Stylus is ~75% cheaper

This is also expected and is the main takeaway from this benchmark - that Stylus is lot faster when doing heavy computational tasks.

Possible optimizations for the Ed25519 Verification

• Our Solidity Ed25519 verification costs 904k gas, but some have optimized it to ~500k gas.
• Using zk-SNARKs, it can go down to 300k gas (and still require off-chain proving).
• And still, it costs more than Stylus's 225k gas.