Dankrad Feist, an Ethereum researcher, introduced Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-9698) recently.
The proposal suggests a structured, hundredfold increase in Ethereum’s gas limit over four years.
Under this plan, Ethereum clients would implement a predetermined exponential growth schedule for the gas limit.
This schedule involves tenfold increases occurring every two years (or 164,250 epochs), starting in June 2025.
Targeting Higher Throughput and Efficiency
If adopted, this gradual expansion would raise the gas limit from the current 36 million to 3.6 billion within four years.
Feist contends that this predictable growth aligns with expected improvements in hardware capabilities and protocol efficiency, promoting a sustainable path forward.
Ethereum developer Fabrice Cheng estimates this change could permit the base layer to handle approximately 2,000 transactions per second.
Addressing Potential Obstacles
Feist acknowledges that significantly increasing the gas limit could strain less powerful nodes and potentially slow down block propagation.
He argues the phased nature of the increase gives node operators and developers sufficient time to upgrade systems and optimize performance in response.
Relation to Near-Term Gas Limit Discussions
This long-term proposal follows a separate suggestion (EIP-7935) by Feist and other researchers (Sophia Gold, Toni Wahrstätter, Carl Beek, and Alex Stokes).
EIP-7935 recommends a more immediate increase of the gas limit to 150 million, potentially timed with the upcoming Fusaka hard fork.
Understanding Ethereum’s Gas Limit
The gas limit on Ethereum sets the maximum amount of computational work (measured in gas units) allowed in a single block.
Gas represents the computational cost of executing transactions or smart contracts.
Users pay for this gas in ETH based on current prices.
A higher gas limit permits more computations, like transactions or contract executions, per block.
Historically, Ethereum’s gas limit began near 5,000 in 2015, reached about 15 million by 2021, settled around 30 million after “The Merge” in 2022, and currently stands at 36 million.
Context: Scaling Challenges and Network Activity
Ethereum currently processes roughly 15–30 transactions per second on its base layer, significantly less than competitors like Solana, Aptos, or Sui, though it is often considered more decentralized.
Raising the Layer 1 capacity directly addresses long-standing criticism about Ethereum’s scalability.
Notably, Ethereum gas fees have remained low (1–2 gwei) recently.
Factors potentially contributing to this change include the effectiveness of proto-danksharding (EIP-4844) in lowering costs for Layer 2s and a shift of user activity to these scaling solutions.
Implications for Ethereum’s Development Path
Ethereum’s widely discussed roadmap, emphasized by co-founder Vitalik Buterin, heavily relies on Layer 2 rollups (e.g., Optimism, Arbitrum) for transaction processing, with Layer 1 focusing on security and data availability.
Critics argue this “rollup-centric” approach adds complexity and potential centralization points (like centralized sequencers common in L2s).
Boosting Layer 1 transaction capacity directly, as EIP-9698 proposes, could enable Ethereum to compete more effectively based on native throughput.
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