Increased gas limits on Ethereum L1 come with risks… but big rewards

The Ethereum community is going head to head in a debate over whether or not to raise the gas limits on the Ethereum mainnet by as much as 100%.

The gas limit refers to the maximum amount of gas that’s allowed to be spent for transactions to be included in a single Ethereum block.

One cohort of Ethereum developers and influencers has thrown their weight behind the idea of raising the gas limit, saying it would enhance the L1’s network capacity and reinvigorate innovation. However, other devs — including the Ethereum Foundation’s Toni Wahrstätter — warn it could pose serious risks to stability and security. 

In a Dec. 9 post on X, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said he would be configuring his validator for a 36M gas limit, which is a 20% gas limit increase from the current 30M, even as other developers call for a much larger increase, as high as 60M. 

Why raise gas limits in the first place?

Emmanuel Awosika, the creative director at 2077 Collective, told Cointelegraph that the core concept behind raising the gas limits is as a way for Ethereum to show that it’s still pushing the envelope and giving ambitious developers something to work with. 

“Right now — with such a low gas limit — there are certain applications you can’t really deploy because the moment those applications go viral, gas prices will spike and it becomes a very degraded user experience.”

“Having higher capacity means more developers have the confidence to deploy stuff on the L1 and not get priced out arbitrarily.”

At the heart of the debate is whether the L1 should be scaled up to enable high-value DeFi activity, or whether the majority of such activity should be pushed to Ethereum’s L2s given the L1’s limited ability to scale up while still remaining the most decentralized and credibly neutral base layer.

While much of the Ethereum developer community has collectively turned its gaze toward the L2-centric roadmap — something Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin began advocating heavily starting in 2022 — Awosika said the pendulum may have swung too far. 

“For a very long time, there was just this agreement that, ‘Yup, L2 roadmap is good — no one say anything bad about it,’ but I’ve always felt that this is just wrong,” he said.

“The ideal version of the Ethereum roadmap is where you still have high-value applications on the L1, things like Uniswap that require lots of security and then you can leave a lot of the other stuff to the L2s.”

“There should always be this focus on making sure the L1 has a lot of valuable stuff on it. This is what makes Ethereum fundamentally different from Bitcoin, which is designed to be left as it is at the base layer.”

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However, crypto commentator Evan Van Ness said that while raising gas limits by as much as 100% is a noble ideal, the notion is practically dead on arrival due to the limited scalability of the L1 in the first place. 

“You raise the gas limit a lot, you bring back a bunch of apps, everything is great for a while, and then demand overwhelms supply and it routinely costs 120 gwei for a transaction again,” Van Ness wrote in a Dec. 9 post to X. 

“Again, gas prices are [already] reasonably low, raising the gas limit isn’t innovation.”

Technical complications above a 40M gas limit

In a Dec. 9 post to the Ethereum Research page, Wahrstätter shared that Ethereum’s consensus layer (CL) client enforces a 10 mebibyte (MiB) maximum uncompressed block size for efficient propagation across the network. 

This restriction is crucial to maintaining block propagation without introducing delays or instability.

According to Wahrstätter, a proposed increase to 60 million gas per block would breach this limit, leading to propagation failures, missed validator slots and network destabilization.

Dankrad Feist summarized the highly technical details in a Dec. 11 post to X. 

“The gas limit is directly controlled by the validators. With every block, a validator votes whether to raise or lower the gas limit. So, very unlike the EIP process, there is no ‘standard process’ to raise the gas limit.

“Now, the gas limit has *never* been increased since the Merge. However, before the Merge, it was an established practice that miners would not use this power arbitrarily, but typically only after core devs signaled it was ok to change it.”

“Unfortunately this hit a bit of a speed bump as Core Devs discovered that raising it over 40m was actually not safe due to a constant that has to be changed in the clients first.”

However, Feist said that even though the gas limit can feasibly be raised above 40M, the fierce debate that had emerged led to a tacit agreement among the development community that 36M was a good “first step” to make this the default. 

“I think it is likely that some big pools will join in the next few weeks and we will see this increase,” he said. 

Top dev’s departure signals “intellectual bottom” for Ethereum

The debate around raising gas limits and revitalizing innovation on the L1 comes as Ethereum core developer Max Resnick announced that he’d be moving to Solana, citing a rigid developer community and a lack of willingness to scale the Ethereum L1 as some of his reasons for the change. 

Resnick has long been a critic of Ethereum’s L2-focused roadmap, saying there should have been a much greater priority put on scaling the L1, allowing for mainnet-based apps to survive and thrive. 

To Awosika, Resnick’s departure and the ensuing drama on social media — particularly from Ethereum advocates — was what he called a “sign of the times.”

“Max is one of the earliest Ethereum developers, he was actually brilliant, and he had a lot of really ambitious plans for the network.”

“And not only did he get sort of get pushed out, but when he actually left, a lot of people were like, ‘good riddance, he was a plant.’ Seeing all of that unfold, you know, I could barely control my rage.”

This marks the intellectual bottom for Ethereum.”

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