- Ethereum developers are working on increasing the protocol’s gas limits amid diverse positions.
- Pectra Upgrade is laying the groundwork for this increase and will go live in the coming weeks.
The core Ethereum development community continuously seeks improvement to the network’s scalability and user experience. Recent community-driven initiatives like pumpthegas.org are fueling a growing demand to increase Ethereum’s block gas limit, with some suggestions surpassing 60 million.
The Need For Caution
However, an Ethereum Foundation Researcher, Toni Wahrstätter, has called for patience in addressing Ethereum’s block gas limit expansion. While a change could enhance network capacity, the researcher noted that it also poses risks to stability and security.
Toni highlighted that current client constraints related to Consensus Layer (CL) specifications make exceeding the present 36 million gas level impractical without protocol upgrades. For context, Ethereum’s CL specification enforces 10 mebibytes (MiB) maximum acceptable uncompressed block size for gossip propagation across the network.
These constraints mitigate negative effects and protect the network’s health. For example, extremely large blocks can encourage potential Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks by forcing nodes to handle massive amounts of data.
Moreover, a proposed increase to 60 million gas per block would breach the 10 MiB limit. This will lead to missed validator slots, propagation failures, and potential network destabilization. However, blocks containing up to 36 million gas stay under acceptable gossip size limitations, providing smooth propagation and consensus stability.
The absence of empirical data on network performance under increased gas limits complicates the situation. Core developers have emphasized the need for a cautious approach to avoid undermining Ethereum’s security and reliability. Parithosh Jayanthi, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, urged developers to prioritize testing and data collection to evaluate the trade-offs of higher gas limits.
Petra Creates A Headway to Gas Limit Increase
Meanwhile, core developers are working on introducing the Pectra 2 network upgrade, which reduces worst-case block sizes and provides the necessary headroom to boost the network’s capacity securely. The Pectra 2 hard fork includes two critical proposals designed to lay the foundation for higher gas limits.
The first is the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 7623 (EIP-7623), which aims to reduce worst-case block sizes. This reduces potential DoS vectors while ensuring the network remains stable and resilient under increased load.
The second change, Proposal EIP-7691, will increase the target/maximum number of blobs per block from 4/6 to 6/9. This improvement provides empirical data on network performance under higher storage and propagation demands.
This data will help core developers and the larger Ethereum community understand how the network reacts to block composition and size changes. The community can use this information to make better decisions on increasing the gas limit while retaining Ethereum’s robustness and security.
As revealed in a CNF report, the first phase of the Pectra upgrade is expected in early 2025. The second package is expected to undergo improvements in the following months, with potential enhancements targeting the introduction of PeerDAS. Furthermore, the Ethereum Foundation recently unveiled the Mekong testnet to prepare developers and stakers for the upcoming Pectra fork.
Meanwhile, the latest announcement has yet to positively impact Ethereum’s price. As of this writing, the price of ETH was worth $3,699, down 4.77% in 24 hours. However, daily trading rose over 122%, indicating investors’ optimism for the digital asset.
