Key Notes
- Ethereum developers are advocating for an increase in the gas limit to boost network capacity.
- The proposal is for the gas limit to move from 36 million to 60 million, almost a 50% increase.
- Despite growing support, some developers oppose this move on operational lag concerns.
Approximately 150,000 Ethereum ETH $1 845 24h volatility: 2.6% Market cap: $222.72 B Vol. 24h: $14.22 B validators, representing 15% of the network’s total, are tilting towards a proposal for large increase in the blockchain’s block gas limit. Their stance was deciphered from the insight gathered from gaslimit.pics, a dashboard created by Ethereum researcher Toni Wahrstätter.
What Increased Gas Limit Mean for Ethereum
According to the dashboard , the plan is to increase the gas limit to 60 million units. It is currently capped at 36 million, making the proposed limit boost nearly double the existing value. The push for a large increase in Ethereum’s block gas limit is capable of expanding Ethereum’s Layer-1 transaction throughput further.
Gas is crucial to the Ethereum blockchain seeing that it is the fundamental unit for measuring the computational effort that is required to execute transactions or smart contracts. Therefore, the gas limit is the maximum amount of gas all transactions can consume within a single block. Increased gas limit holds certain potentials for the network
Firstly, it would facilitate the processing of more data by each block. Also, the network becomes boosted to take on higher volume of transactions. For other major protocol upgrades, such a change would need a hard fork but in this case, it does not. All validators need to do is to adjust their node configurations whenever they are proposing blocks.
The block gas limit automatically adjusts as soon as over 50% of validators show support. Some developers are concerned about the strain that raising the limit would have on node operators’ hardware. They believe that the proposed hike could potentially impact network operations as well.
Should that proposed boost be adopted, it would mark the second time that the fee is being adjusted in the last 6 months. The initial gas limit cap was 15 million and in 2021, it was raised to 30 million. By February 2025, the 30 million gas limit was adjusted to 36 million.
Ethereum Gas Fee Fluctuates Consistently
It is worth noting that Ethereum gas fees have fluctuated in recent times. A year ago, right after the Ethereum Dencun upgrade that allowed the creation of Ethereum blobs, gas fees recorded a significant surge .
A few weeks later, it was reported that the gas fees had had their lowest drop in three years.
According to onchain analytics platform Santiment, the average fee for transactions on the ETH network reduced to $1.12 per transaction at the time. This low drop-in fee level makes transactions easy and affordable for Ethereum users. Notably, the drop drew in more usage, which had a positive impact on the ETH price.
ETH price has not improved as expected, especially after all the upgrades implemented in the Ethereum ecosystem lately. Besides, the launch of spot Ethereum ETFs has not fully impacted the coin’s valuation after almost a year.
Ethereum was trading at $2,638.37 at press time, corresponding with a 2.59% increase within the last 24 hours.
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