In the past, many people’s impression of ETH’s TPS (transactions per second) remained at “15 transactions per second.” However, with ongoing protocol optimizations, Ethereum’s current TPS peak has increased to about 60, a fourfold increase.

Although this change is related to continuous optimization over many years, to discuss the most direct reason, it still needs to bethanks toEasily and effectively adjust the GAS Limit from the previous cap of 15 million to a new cap of 36 million.

Recently, ETH is about to increase the GAS Limit to a maximum of 60 million again.

What is GAS Limit?

Each of us needs to pay Gas as transaction fees when using ETH. Gas Limit, as the name suggests, is the upper limit of Gas that each block can accommodate. The higher this limit, the more transactions the block can process, and the network speed will improve accordingly.

Among the many scaling solutions, increasing the Gas Limit is arguably the most immediate way.

More importantly, this adjustment does not require a hard fork, as the Gas Limit is a dynamic parameter in Ethereum, and PoS nodes can fine-tune it under the existing protocol rules.

In other words, the protocol itself allows each new block producer to adjust the Gas Limit relative to the parent block within a range of ±1/1024, which is part of the consensus mechanism itself. This is also fundamentally different from Bitcoin’s mechanism of fixing the block size to 1MB.

Therefore, increasing the Gas Limit does not require a system upgrade or code modification; as long as PoS nodes continuously “signal” their support during block production, the network can gradually adopt this change. Currently, there are over 1 million validators across the Ethereum network, and as long as a certain level of support is reached, the network will automatically transition to the new Gas limit and ensure compatibility for all nodes.

As of now, approximately 15% of validators have chosen to support the setting of 60 million Gas. Ebunker has also participated in support, and as a non-custodial node service provider, we always pay attention to the balance between Ethereum network performance and decentralization. Since this is a voluntary process, a considerable portion of nodes still maintains the configuration of the old version (for example, 30 million).

Increasing the Gas Limit does not mean that PoS nodes can earn more money; in fact, it is highly likely that they earn less.

Since the launch of EIP-1559, the Base Fee of Ethereum is directly burned, and validators can only earn the small tips that users voluntarily add. When the Gas Limit is increased, it means that the overall processing capacity of the network is enhanced, reducing transaction congestion and alleviating the pressure of competing for tips, which naturally leads to a decrease in tip amounts. Therefore, to some extent, raising the Gas Limit actually reduces validators’ income, while the amount of ETH burned further increases.

Therefore, under such an incentive mechanism, choosing to support validators with a Gas Limit of 60 million can be said to be selfless.

In addition, the community recently proposed a rather controversial proposal — EIP-9698. This proposal suggests raising the Gas Limit from 36 million to 3.6 billion over the next four years, aiming to increase Ethereum’s TPS to around 2000, directly targeting the current high-performance chain Solana. However, this idea is clearly a bit radical.

In theory, as long as the hardware performance of the nodes is strong enough, the Gas Limit can indeed be continuously increased. However, the reality is that the Ethereum network has over 1 million active validators, which must accommodate a wide range of participants. In contrast, some other high-performance public chains have only hundreds of validators, resulting in a gap of up to ten thousand times 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 research by ethpandaops, after the Gas Limit was raised to 60 million, about 90% of blocks can be discovered for the first time within 1016 milliseconds. Compared to before, the block propagation delay has slightly increased, but it remains within an acceptable range.

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

Of course, if Ethereum implements a “large node / small node” architecture in the future, for example, allowing nodes that stake 2048 ETH to handle higher loads while 32 ETH nodes handle smaller blocks, it may open up new space for further scalability.

So, although everyone often jokes that the ETH Gas Price keeps hitting new lows and that the “noble chain” no longer exists, this may not only be due to market changes, but rather that Ethereum itself is indeed becoming faster, more efficient, and more accessible.

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