Gas-Efficient Smart Contract Design: Quantifying Refactoring Impact on EVM Execution Costs

Abstract: High transaction costs remain a major barrier to the scalability of Ethereum-based decentralized applications (DApps), particularly when smart contracts are computationally inefficient. Although the Solidity compiler optimizer can reduce bytecode size and improve some low-level patterns, it does not fully address structural inefficiencies in storage layout and state mutation. This study introduces controlled empirical research on the topic of manual smart contract refactoring approaches with the aim of quantifying their impact on gas usage and execution cost in the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The Remix Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and a synchronized Go-Ethereum (Geth) node (version 1.13.5) were configured to create a controlled experimental environment. This environment was connected to the Sepolia Testnet to approximate conditions similar to the Ethereum Mainnet. The role of high-cost storage operations such as SSTORE was analyzed using opcode-level transaction traces, which were collected using debug_traceTransaction. The proposed refactoring plan implies the alignment of storage slots by systematically packing the variables and data location optimization (calldata and memory) to minimize unnecessary memory allocation. The experiments show gas reductions of up to 40.68% for storage-intensive functions, with an average reduction of 28.5% across all evaluated test cases. Moreover, the findings at the opcode level have shown that it is possible to reduce the costs of unnecessary storage writes without impacting the correct functional performance of the execution. Overall, the findings show that storage-aware manual refactoring is a viable strategy for improving runtime efficiency and reducing the execution cost of Layer-1 smart contracts.

Nur Haliza Abdul Wahab, Juniardi Nur Fadila, Nur Faszha Razali and Keng Yinn Wong. “Gas-Efficient Smart Contract Design: Quantifying Refactoring Impact on EVM Execution Costs”. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA) 17.5 (2026). http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170561

@article{Wahab2026,
title = {Gas-Efficient Smart Contract Design: Quantifying Refactoring Impact on EVM Execution Costs},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170561},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170561},
year = {2026},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {17},
number = {5},
author = {Nur Haliza Abdul Wahab and Juniardi Nur Fadila and Nur Faszha Razali and Keng Yinn Wong}
}