Ethereum Co-Founder Proposes 16.77 Million Gas Limit Cap for Enhanced Security

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, and researcher Toni Wahrstätter have introduced a new proposal, EIP-7983, aimed at enhancing the security and performance of the Ethereum network. The proposal suggests capping the gas limit for individual transactions at 16.77 million, a significant reduction from the previously proposed 30 million gas limit. This change is designed to protect the network from denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and stabilize it by making transaction costs more predictable.

The proposal, created on GitHub in late June and finalized recently, states that the gas limit will affect the Ethereum network at the protocol level. By capping the gas limit, the network can break transactions into smaller fragments, improving compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs). This design change will lead to faster zero-knowledge proofs and more participants to help verify work, ultimately enhancing the network's overall efficiency and security.

The new gas cap will also help in securing and stabilizing the Ethereum network. Theoretically, a single transaction on the Ethereum network could consume the entire block’s gas limit, leaving no room for other transactions. This could pose several risks, including DoS attacks, which impact the network's stability. By implementing a stable gas usage, the network can balance parallel execution across threads in future Ethereum scaling models, ensuring a more equitable distribution of gas between transactions in each block.

EIP-7983 further states that the transaction cap limit will be enforced regardless of the block gas limit set by validators. Any transaction that exceeds the gas limit of 16.77 million will be rejected with a specific error code. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) behavior will change to exclude any transaction with a gas limit more than 16.77 million in the txpool, a waiting room for ETH transactions. At the block validation level and before the processing stage, the EVM will reject any block that has a transaction with a gas limit greater than the specified limit.

The selection of 16.77 million as the gas limit was chosen because it provides a balance between allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution bounds. This value will make use cases like smart contract deployments and complex DeFi transactions run smoothly without causing unpredictable slowdowns. The proposal aims to distribute gas consumption more evenly, reducing the chance of single transactions overwhelming a block and enhancing the network's resilience.

EIP-7983 is not the first proposal to introduce a cap on the ETH gas limit. EIP-7825 was the first proposal to introduce a gas limit for Ethereum transactions of 30 million. The proposal was published in November of last year and the 30 million gas cap was selected at the time because it is based on the average size of Ethereum blocks today. Many Ethereum developers supported EIP-7825; however, they pushed for a lower gas limit. The new proposal by Buterin and Wahrstätter addresses these concerns by setting a more conservative gas limit, ensuring the network's stability and security.