Ethereum developers have proposed to increase the gas limit to scale the network
The solution will reduce transaction fees by 15-33%
21.03.2024 - 08:18
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What’s new? Ethereum developer Eric Connor and former head of smart contracts at MakerDAO Mariano Conti unveiled the “Pump the gas” initiative to increase Ethereum’s gas limit from 30 million to 40 million, which is designed to scale the underlying blockchain. According to them, raising the limit will reduce transaction fees by around 15-33%.
What else is known? The gas limit is the maximum amount of transaction fees. Gas is the fee in ETH coins required to conduct a transaction or execute a smart contract on the network. The authors of the initiative explain that each transaction has a predefined gas fee, and contracts have a gas limit that cannot be exceeded during execution. This prevents the network from being overloaded by malicious contracts or excessive resource consumption.
Connor and Conti encouraged individual stakers and staking pools, as well as Ethereum client teams, to join the initiative. On March 20, for example, validator Rocket Pool already offered a block with a gas limit of 40 million.
Also, the authors of the initiative recalled that the successful March 13 Dencun hard fork, which introduced a mechanism for storing compressed large arrays of binary data (blobs), reduced fees in L2 networks, but not in the main blockchain. They said the combination of blobs and an increase in the gas limit could help scale both L2 networks and the Ethereum main blockchain.
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Back in January, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed to increase the gas limit from 30 million set in August 2021 to 40. Back then he was supported by Jesse Pollack, the developer of the Layer 2 (L2) Base network from crypto exchange Coinbase. He noted that the network has a safety margin and that raising the limit will be beneficial to all parties.
After the Dencun hard fork, activity in Ethereum increased to a 12-month-high, which in turn led to an increase in the amount of burned ETH paid as transaction fees.
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