30% of Ethereum validators signal higher block gas limit, data shows

Quick Take

  • Over 30% of Ethereum validators have signaled support for increasing the block gas limit, according to data compiled by Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter.
  • The current gas limit of 30 million is seen as a bottleneck due to increased demand and the complexity of applications on Ethereum.

Over 30% of Ethereum validators are signaling their support for an increase in the block gas limit — a critical parameter that dictates the network’s capacity to process transactions — data compiled by Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter shows.

Currently, the Ethereum gas limit is 30 million, and one-third of validators have indicated that the Ethereum block gas limit should be raised.

Validators proposing and validating blocks can modify their node configurations to signal their support for a higher limit without requiring a hard fork. Once more than 50% of validators approve, the block gas limit will automatically adjust from 30 million to 36 million gas units, Trenton Van Epps, Ethereum contributor and member of the Protocol Guild, explained.

Recognizing the need for increased capacity, an initiative known as “Pump the Gas” emerged last year, advocating an increase in the gas limit. Led by Ethereum developer Eric Connor and former MakerDAO head of smart contracts Mariano Conti, it aims to educate the Ethereum community about the gas limit and its role in improving Ethereum scaling.

In the Ethereum blockchain, “gas” is the fundamental unit to measure the computational effort required to execute transactions or smart contracts. Every operation performed on the Ethereum network, from simple token transfers to complex smart contract interactions, consumes a certain amount of gas. This mechanism ensures that users pay for the resources they consume and prevents malicious actors from overloading the network. As such, the gas limit defines the maximum amount of gas all transactions can consume within a single block. This limit is a critical safeguard against network congestion and potential denial-of-service attacks.

The timeline for this gas limit increase is unclear. Following the implementation of proto-danksharding (blobs) in last year's Dencun upgrade, the urgency to raise the gas limit has somewhat decreased. The addition of blobs has eased some scalability issues by offering a new approach to data storage and management, which is particularly useful for Layer 2 rollups. Nonetheless, if Ethereum's demand for decentralized applications grows over time, an increase in the gas limit will become necessary.


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About Author

Vishal Chawla is The Block’s Crypto Ecosystems Editor and has spent over seven years covering tech protocols, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Vishal can be reached on Twitter at @vishal4c and via email at [email protected]

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