Vitalik Buterin Proposes 16.77-Million Gas Cap to Shield Ethereum From DoS

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter have filed Ethereum Improvement Proposal 7983, calling for a hard cap of 16.77 million gas on every transaction executed on the network.

The authors say the limit would curb denial-of-service vectors, make block verification times more predictable and improve compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines, which rely on smaller, modular transactions. They stress that the measure does not alter Ethereum’s overall block gas limit, leaving miners and validators in control of aggregate capacity.

Under the proposal, any transaction specifying a gas limit above 16.77 million would be rejected from the mempool, and blocks containing such transactions would be deemed invalid. The 16.77 million figure—2^24 gas units—was selected to accommodate common activities such as contract deployment and complex DeFi interactions while enforcing clearer execution boundaries.

Most existing transactions already fall below the proposed threshold, so the authors expect minimal disruption, though some developers may need to split large operations into multiple calls. EIP-7983 now moves to community review; if accepted, it would be scheduled for inclusion in a future network upgrade.

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