Ethereum Proposes 100x Gas Limit Increase Over Four Years

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.

Feist’s proposal aims to address the current gas limit mechanism, which relies on miner/operator voting. This approach, while flexible, can lead to stagnation or overly cautious increases due to a lack of coordination and predictability. By introducing a predictable exponential growth pattern as a client default, Feist’s 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, pushing the network’s capacity to around 3.6 billion gas. This would support approximately 2,000 transactions per second and 6,000 transactions per block, significantly increasing the network’s current gas limit of approximately 36 million.

Feist’s proposal aligns with 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.

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. Ethereum core developer Lukasz Rozmej 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).”