Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently advocated for a moderate increase in Gas limits to enhance the network’s throughput during a Reddit AMA event. According to his calculations, it would be reasonable to increase the Gas limit to approximately 40 million.
In the second half of 2021, Ethereum implemented the notable London upgrade, which included the EIP-1559 improvement proposal. The main purpose of this update was to optimize Ethereum’s transaction fees (gas) and market mechanism. After the implementation of EIP-1559, the Gas limit for each block was increased twofold, but the actual gas usage is dynamically adjusted based on network demand to maintain a block utilization rate of approximately 50%.
On the 10th day, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin (V God) advocated during a Reddit AMA event that it would be a reasonable choice to moderately increase the Gas limit to enhance network throughput.
Gas limit refers to the maximum amount of Gas that can be used for transactions or executing smart contracts on Ethereum in each block. This limit ensures that block sizes are appropriate and avoids impacting network performance and synchronization.
V God proposed a 33% increase in the Gas limit. He pointed out that since the implementation of EIP-1559, Ethereum’s Gas limit has not been increased for almost three years, setting a record for the longest time in the protocol’s history. Despite EIP-1559 doubling the Gas limit, the actual average gas usage has only increased by about 9%.
V God proposed that the benefits of technological progress brought by Moore’s Law should be evenly distributed, with half being used to increase network capacity and the other half to improve synchronization and verification convenience. According to his calculations, it would be reasonable to increase the Gas limit to approximately 40 million. Currently, according to Etherscan data, the Gas limit is 30 million, which means the proposed adjustment would increase the limit by 33%.
The chart above shows the average Gas limit of Ethereum. Source: Etherscan
The chart above shows that since the launch of Ethereum in 2015, the average Gas limit per block has gradually increased as the network usage and adoption have grown.
The surge in Ethereum’s transaction costs (Gas prices) due to the NFT craze has also sparked discussions about network scalability. According to Etherscan data, the current average Gas price is about 23 Gwei (Gwei is one billionth of an Ether), equivalent to approximately $1.25.
Due to the NFT frenzy, Ethereum’s Gas fees skyrocketed to a high of 155 Gwei in May last year, and in November, another round of NFT speculation drove up Gas fees, even spreading to the Ethereum Goerli test network. This led to an average Gas fee of up to 12,323 Gwei on the test network, requiring an average Gas fee of 0.156 ETH per transaction to complete, even causing a 50% surge in the test coin gETH.
The chart above shows the average Gas fees of Ethereum. Source: Etherscan
The NFT craze not only drove up Ethereum’s Gas fees but also reignited discussions about network scalability. V God’s proposal to increase the Gas limit aims to enhance Ethereum’s network throughput and processing capacity to meet the growing transaction demand. However, it also comes with increased hardware burden and potential risks of network spam and attacks.
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