Ethereum increases gas limit for the first time since proof-of-stake migration

Ethereum reached the consensus needed to increase the network's gas limit, with 50% of the validators signaling for this change to help improve the network's scalability.

The gas limit is a critical parameter that dictates the network’s transaction capacity. Previously capped at 30 million, the gas limit has increased above the 31 million mark.

More than half of the validators’ approval was needed for the gas limit adjustment to take effect, which occurred yesterday. Once more than 50% of validators signaled support, the block gas limit automatically adjusted without requiring a hard fork.

This is the first time such a change has been implemented under Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. The last adjustment took place in 2021 when the gas limit doubled from 15 million to 30 million gas units.

On Ethereum, gas is the fundamental unit to measure the computational effort needed to execute transactions or smart contracts. The gas limit is the maximum amount of gas all transactions can consume within a single block.

According to data from  gas limit.pics , the average gas limit over the last 24 hours was 31.5 million gas units, and it's expected to adjust to a max capacity of 36 million gas units.

Despite recent scalability improvements from the Dencun upgrade and proto-dank sharding, increasing the gas limit was necessary to further scale the network.