Vitalik Buterin has proposed lowering the gas limit in Ethereum to reduce the risk of DoS attacks

What’s new? Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, together with blockchain analyst Toni Wahrstätter, has proposed a new gas limit for transactions on the network. The limit could be set as part of the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) number 7983.

Data on GitHub

What else is known? EIP-7983 imposes a gas limit of 16,77 million units per transaction. Ethereum currently enforces a gas limit of 36 million units per block with no limit on each individual transaction.

The per-transaction limit is expected to improve the network’s resilience to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, increase its stability, and offer more predictable transaction processing costs.

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For example, under the current Ethereum architecture, a single transaction can theoretically consume the entire block gas limit, which creates the risk of DoS attacks and leads to unpredictable network behavior.

By limiting individual transactions, EIP-7983 seeks to distribute gas consumption more evenly, reducing the likelihood of individual transactions exceeding the block’s capacity.

“The proposed cap of 16 777 216 gas (2^24) provides a balance between allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution bounds. This value enables most current use cases, including contract deployments and advanced DeFi interactions, while ensuring consistent performance characteristics,” the proposal said.

The absence of a gas limit per transaction could result in inefficient load balancing, vulnerability to certain types of attacks, and compatibility issues with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVM) and parallel transaction execution.

Under EIP-7983, the proposed limit of 16,77 million gigs per transaction would apply across the board, regardless of the gigs-per-block limits set by miners or validators. Transactions exceeding this limit will be rejected.

The proposed change is not backward compatible and will only affect a small number of users and decentralized applications (dApps), as current transactions are mostly well below the proposed limit.

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In May, Buterin called for simplifying the underlying protocol of the Ethereum network to improve efficiency, security, and availability. He proposed restructuring the network architecture at the consensus and execution layers and making it more compact within five years.

Ethereum’s growing complexity has led to longer development times, higher costs, and increased security risks, the developer said.