When people think about Ethereum's gas costs they usually imagine the fee you pay to send a transaction or deploy a contract. But if we go a little bit deeper, we find another important use of gas: precompiles. Precompiles are hardcoded smart contracts build directly into Ethereum protocol. Unlike normal contracts, which run on the EVM, precompiles are coded in low level code like C or Rust, and execute at native speeds. They're used for cryptographic operations that would be too expensive or slow to run in Solidity.

There are 11 Ethereum precompiles:

0x01, ECDSA Recovery

0x02, SHA256

0x03, RIPEMD160

0x04, Identity

0x05, ModExp

0x06, ECADD

0x07, ECMUL

0x08, ECPAIRING

0x09, Blake2f

0x0A, Keccak256

0x0B, Point evaluation

 These precompiles are a really important part of Ethereum infrastructure. For example, sk-snarks use modexp and ecpairing, wallets use ec recovery, and layer 2s use identity, etc. However, the issue is that precompile gas costs were set years ago making them mispriced today. A lot of precompiles are overpriced or underpriced leading to devs avoiding some and relying on others because of gas, not necessarily which ones are the best fit, and even botnets spamming underpriced precompiles. The gas spent on precompiles is also increasing, it's 15% of all gas now compared to a mere 5% in 2020. 

Personally, I think that this isn't an urgent issue, but the Ethereum infrastructure does need some change.