Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is facing a heated debate among its developers, node operators, and users on increasing gas limit suggestions by Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, on Reddit ask-me-anything (AMA) arranged by the Ethereum Foundation.
Buterin suggested a “modest” 33% gas limit increase to improve network throughput and capacity potentially, arguing that it would allow more transactions for each block and reduce congestion. He proposed increasing the gas limit from 30 million to 40 million, reducing the average block time from 13 seconds to 10 seconds.
However, his proposal has met with strong opposition from some Ethereum developers, who have raised various concerns about its implications for the network’s security, scalability, and usability. In a blog post titled “Why increasing the gas limit is difficult,” Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden explained some of the main challenges that his peers face.
One of the main challenges is the increasing size of the blockchain state, which contains account balances and smart contract data. Van der Wijden said that right now, the state size is roughly 267GB only for Ethereum, but it could grow even faster if the gas limit is increased. He cited Blockchair as a source for this estimate.
Another challenge is that higher gas limits also increase synchronization times, making building diverse clients harder. Van der Wijden said that there are no concrete solutions yet for state growth, but some potential upgrades like EIP-4444 tackling chain history expiration and EIP-4844 for rollup data availability using ‘blobs’ could help curb long-term growth trends.
Gnosis Co-founder Warns Against Ethereum Gas Limit Hike
Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann also expressed his concerns about increasing gas limits on Reddit. He said that higher gas limits would mean higher fees for users and developers and a higher risk of denial-of-service attacks. He suggested that Ethereum should focus on improving its consensus mechanism and sharding technology instead of increasing gas limits.
Increasing it definitely has a downside. State will grow faster, sync time will get slower quicker, DoS potential will grow, said the Ethereum team lead Péter Szilágyi.
The debate over Vitalik’s gas limit proposal reflects some of Ethereum’s ongoing challenges as it strives to become a more scalable, secure, and user-friendly platform for decentralized applications. The network has undergone several upgrades to address these issues in recent years, but there is still room for improvement and innovation.
Some software developers have suggested alternative ways to enable real-world users to run Ethereum nodes on their everyday machines without relying on expensive hardware or high-end GPUs. However, this will require more research and development regarding software architecture and optimization.
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