Ethereum Raises Gas Limit to 60 Million Again, Scaling Path Becoming Clearer

Original Article Title: "Ethereum to Further Increase Gas Limit to 60 Million, Scalability Path Becoming Clear"

Original Article Author: Ebunker

Ethereum is expected to raise the block Gas Limit to 60 million, marking a key step forward in the mainnet's scalability process. In the past, many people's impression of ETH's TPS (transactions per second) was still stuck at "15 transactions per second." However, with ongoing protocol optimizations, Ethereum's current TPS peak has increased to around 60, a fourfold increase.

While this change is related to years of continuous optimization, the most direct reason can be attributed to the simple yet effective increase of the Gas Limit from the previous 15 million cap to a 36 million cap. Recently, ETH is set to once again raise the Gas Limit to a 60 million cap.

What is the Gas Limit?

Every one of us using ETH needs to pay Gas as a transaction fee. The Gas Limit, as the name suggests, is the maximum amount of Gas each block can contain. The higher this limit, the more transactions a block can process, leading to an increase in network speed. Among the various scalability paths, raising the Gas Limit can be considered the most immediate way to scale.

More importantly, this adjustment does not require a hard fork, as the Gas Limit is a dynamic parameter in Ethereum, allowing PoS nodes to fine-tune under existing protocol rules. In other words, the protocol itself allows each new block producer to adjust the Gas Limit relative to the parent block within a ± 1/1024 range, which is part of the consensus mechanism. This is vastly different from Bitcoin's mechanism of fixing the block size at 1 MB.

Therefore, increasing the Gas Limit does not require a system upgrade or code modification; as long as PoS nodes continue to "signal" support when producing blocks, they can drive the network to gradually adopt this change. Currently, there are over 1 million validators in the Ethereum network, and once a certain level of support is reached, the network will automatically transition to the new Gas Limit and ensure compatibility for all nodes.

As of now, approximately 15% of validators have chosen to support the 60 million Gas setting. Ebunker has also participated in support. As a non-custodial node service provider, we always pay attention to the balance between Ethereum network performance and decentralization. Since this is a voluntary process, there is still a significant portion of nodes maintaining the old configurations (e.g., 30 million).

Increasing the Gas Limit does not necessarily mean that a PoS validator can earn more money. In fact, it is highly likely that they will earn less. Since the implementation of EIP-1559, Ethereum's Base Fee is directly burned, and validators can only earn tips voluntarily added by users. When the Gas Limit is increased, it means that the entire network's processing capacity is enhanced, transaction congestion is reduced, and the pressure to compete for tips is also reduced, naturally leading to a decrease in tip amounts. Therefore, to some extent, an increase in the Gas Limit may reduce a validator's income, while the amount of ETH burned further increases.

Therefore, under such an incentive mechanism, validators who still choose to support a 60 million Gas Limit can be considered altruistic. Additionally, the community has recently proposed a controversial EIP-9698. This proposal suggests raising the Gas Limit from 36 million to 3.6 billion over the next four years, with the goal of increasing Ethereum's TPS to around 2000, directly challenging the high-performance chain Solana. However, this idea is clearly quite ambitious.

In theory, as long as a node's hardware performance is strong enough, the Gas Limit can indeed be continually increased. However, the reality is that the Ethereum network has over a million active validators, necessitating consideration for a broad range of participants. In contrast, some other high-performance public chains have validator numbers only in the hundreds, resulting in a difference of magnitude of thousands between the two.

Even the current proposal to increase the Gas Limit from 36 million to 60 million was made possible after the Pectra upgrade introduced execution load optimizations to the network. According to research by ethpandaops, after the Gas Limit was raised to 60 million, about 90% of blocks could be first discovered within 1016 milliseconds. Compared to before, there was a slight increase in block propagation delay, but it remains within an acceptable range.

However, 66% of nodes in the Ethereum network need to fully receive a block and its associated blob data within 4 seconds to ensure the block is considered valid. Based on this propagation constraint, the theoretical upper limit of the Gas Limit estimated on the testnet is about 150 million. Therefore, in the current architecture, the vision of EIP-9698 is difficult to achieve in the short term.

Of course, if Ethereum were to implement a "Big Node/Small Node" architecture in the future, such as allowing nodes staking 2048 ETH to process higher loads while 32 ETH nodes handle smaller blocks, it may open up new possibilities for further scalability. So, even though we often joke about the continuously dropping ETH Gas Price and the "feudal chain" being a thing of the past, this may not only be due to market changes, but because Ethereum itself is indeed becoming faster, more efficient, and more accessible.

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