Ethereum Network Prepares for Gas Limit Expansion as Validator Support Grows

• The Ethereum gas limit, which was proposed to be increased from 36 million to 60 million units, has received support from about 150,000 validators. 
• Experts have, however, suggested that this should be approached with caution to avoid straining the network. 

A recent proposal to increase Ethereum’s block gas limit has received massive support, as 150,000 validators gave a thumbs up. Mathematically, this represents 15% of the network’s total.

Detailing this, gaslimit.pics, a platform created by Ethereum researcher Toni Wahrstätter, indicated that this move could increase the gas limit to 60 million units from the current level of 36 million.

Earlier, this was capped at 30 million, but was increased to 36 million in February this year, as featured in our previous blog post. Prior to this, the team subjected the gas limit to a significant increment in 2021 when it expanded from 15 million to 30 million.

In the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 9698 submitted by Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist, it was highlighted that the intention is to boost the network’s capacity as well as performance. According to him, the current gas limit largely relies on miner/operator voting. In this case, it has been existing with no coordination and predictability.

While flexible, this approach can lead to stagnation or overly cautious increases. By introducing a predictable exponential growth pattern as a client default, this EIP encourages a sustainable and transparent gas limit trajectory, aligned with expected advancements in hardware and protocol efficiency.

Experts have observed that the implementation of his plan would increase the gas limit by 100-fold and ensure that the network capacity is increased to 3.6 billion gas. According to them, this would support as many as 2,000 transactions per second and 6,000 transactions per block.

Experts Speak on the Ethereum Gas Limit Proposal

While this proposal has been lauded by several key figures in the Ethereum ecosystem, core developer Lukasz Rozmej has cautioned that this should be handled with care. Per his observation, there could be an unexpected network strain if not manually agreed upon or kept gradual.

In a similar vein, Ethereum Foundation developer Jochem Brouwer has indicated that increasing the gas limit by 100% in the next four years could lead to problems. According to him, there should be a 2x gas limit over the next six months.

Let’s do this in steps before we have the majority of the nodes committed to this 100x increase in 4 years schedule and we will have a problem when we find out the limit is getting too high (then we thus need to coordinate with all nodes to opt-out and shut it down again).

Amidst this backdrop, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also laid plans to enhance the privacy of the Layer 1 network without affecting consensus. As discussed in our previous news story, he believes that there should be a privacy tool in wallets such as Metamask to offer the option to hide details before making transactions. Meanwhile, this is different from the full rollout of the EIP-4444 earlier proposed by Vitalik and reviewed by CNF.

As part of its broader initiative, Ethereum has also embarked on its Pectra upgrade to introduce smart contract features to wallets, as highlighted in our previous publication.

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