New Progress on Ethereum Scaling: Gas Limit is About to Increase to 60 Million

The performance of the Ethereum network is continuously improving. In the past, it was widely believed that Ethereum's transaction processing capability was only 15 transactions per second, (TPS). However, after continuous optimization, the peak TPS of Ethereum has now reached about 60 transactions per second, an increase of 4 times.

This significant progress is mainly attributed to raising the Gas Limit from 15 million to 36 million. Now, Ethereum is preparing to further increase the Gas Limit to 60 million.

The Gas Limit refers to the maximum amount of Gas that can be accommodated in each block. The higher this limit, the more transactions a single block can handle, and the greater the network throughput. Among many scaling solutions, increasing the Gas Limit can be considered the most direct and effective method.

It is worth noting that adjusting the Gas Limit does not require a hard fork. This is because the Gas Limit is a dynamic parameter in Ethereum, and PoS nodes can fine-tune it under the existing protocol rules. The protocol allows each new block producer to adjust the Gas Limit within a range of ±1/1024 relative to the parent block, which is itself a part of the consensus mechanism. This mechanism is fundamentally different from Bitcoin's approach of fixing the block size at 1MB.

Currently, about 15% of validators have chosen to support the setting of 60 million Gas. Since this is a voluntary process, a considerable number of nodes still maintain the configuration of the old version (such as 30 million).

Increasing the Gas Limit does not mean that PoS nodes can earn more revenue; in fact, it may reduce their income. Since the implementation of EIP-1559, the base fee of Ethereum is directly burned, and validators can only earn the small tips added by users. After the Gas Limit is increased, the network's processing capacity enhances, transaction congestion decreases, and the pressure to compete for tips lowers, which naturally leads to a decrease in tip amounts. Therefore, to some extent, raising the Gas Limit may actually reduce the income of validators while increasing the amount of ETH burned.

Recently, the community proposed a rather controversial proposal EIP-9698. This proposal suggests increasing the Gas Limit from 36 million to 3.6 billion over the next four years, aiming to raise Ethereum's TPS to around 2000, closely approaching current high-performance public chains. However, this idea is clearly too radical.

In theory, as long as the node hardware performance is sufficient, the Gas Limit can indeed be continuously raised. However, the reality is that the Ethereum network has over one million active validators, which needs to accommodate a wide range of participants. In contrast, some high-performance public chains have only a few hundred validators, resulting in a huge gap between the two.

Even the proposal to increase the Gas Limit from 36 million to 60 million was only able to enter the network adjustment rhythm after the Pectra upgrade brought execution load optimization.

According to the research, after the Gas Limit was raised to 60 million, about 90% of the blocks could be discovered for the first time within 1016 milliseconds. Compared to before, the block propagation delay has slightly increased, but it is still within an acceptable range.

However, 66% of the nodes in the Ethereum network need to fully receive the block and its accompanying blob data within 4 seconds for the block to be considered valid. Based on this propagation limit, the theoretical upper limit of the Gas Limit calculated by the testnet is approximately 150 million. Therefore, under the current architecture, the vision of EIP-9698 is difficult to achieve in the short term.

In the future, if Ethereum implements a "large node/small node" architecture, for example, allowing nodes that stake 2048 ETH to handle higher loads, while 32 ETH nodes handle smaller blocks, it may create new possibilities for further scaling.

In summary, the Ethereum network is becoming faster, more efficient, and more user-friendly. This is not only a result of market changes but also a reflection of the continuous optimization of the network itself.