Ethereum researcher proposes 100x gas limit hike for network boost

Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist has proposed a significant change to the network’s gas limit, aiming to boost transaction capacity and network performance.

On April 27, Feist submitted Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 9698, suggesting that Ethereum’s gas limit should grow 100 times over the next four years through automated client-side settings.

According to Feist:

“The current gas limit mechanism relies on miner/operator voting, which lacks 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.”

Ethereum community member Fabda.eth explained that Feist’s plan would result in a 100-fold increase that would push the network’s capacity to around 3.6 billion gas, supporting approximately 2,000 transactions per second and 6,000 transactions per block.

This would significantly increase the network’s current gas limit of approximately 36 million.

Notably, Feist’s proposal aligns a similar suggestion by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. In February, Buterin advocated for a tenfold gas limit increase, arguing that it would support transaction inclusion and application development on the base layer, despite growing reliance on Layer 2 solutions.

Ethereum developers express concerns

While many within the community see potential benefits of expanding the blockchain network’s gas limit, several developers voiced caution about Feist’s proposal aggressive growth pace.

Lukasz Rozmej, an Ethereum core developer, cautioned that any expansion should either be manually agreed upon or kept gradual to avoid unexpected network strain.

Ethereum Foundation developer Jochem Brouwer echoed these sentiments. He warned that targeting a 100x increase within four years could prove too aggressive.

Instead, he advocated a more measured approach, suggesting a 2x gas limit increase over the next six months.

Brouwer added:

“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).”

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