Adding gas limits to Ethereum L1 comes with risks… but huge rewards

The Ethereum community is moving forward in the debate of whether or not to raise the gas limit on the Ethereum mainnet to 100%.

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

A group of Ethereum developers and influencers have rejected the idea of ​​raising the gas limit, saying it would increase the capacity of the L1 network and stimulate innovation. However, other devs — including the Ethereum Foundation's Tony Wahrster — warn that it could pose a serious risk to stability and security.

On December 9th at X, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake will set his validator to a 36M gas limit, which is a 20% increase from the current 30M gas limit, although other developers are calling for a much larger increase, up to 60M.

Why increase gas limits in the first place?

Emanuel Awosika, creative director at 2077 Collective, told Cointelegraph that the main concept behind raising the gas limits is to show that Ethereum is still pushing the envelope and offering something to ambitious developers.

“Right now – with such a low gas limit – there are certain apps that you can't really deploy because when those apps go viral, the gas price goes up and it becomes a very degraded user experience.”

“Having higher capacity means more developers have the confidence to deploy things on L1 and not get arbitrary pricing.”

The crux of the debate is whether L1 should expand to enable high-value DeFi activity, or whether most such activity should be pushed to Ethereum's L2s because L1's limited scalability is too decentralized and still in place. Loyalty neutral base layer.

As much of the Ethereum developer community turns its sights to an L2-centric roadmap, one thing Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has been heavily backing since 2022 — Avosika says the pendulum may be too far.

“For a long time it was the consensus that, yes, the L2 roadmap is good — nobody's saying anything bad about it, but I've always felt that it's just wrong,” he said.

“The best version of Ethereum's roadmap is one where there are still high-value applications on L1, like Uniswap that need a lot of security, and then you can leave a lot of other things to L2s.”

“L1 always has this focus to make sure there's a lot of useful stuff on it. That's what fundamentally separates Ethereum from Bitcoin, which is designed to leave it at the base layer.”

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However, crypto analyst Evan Ness said that while increasing the gas limits to 100% is a good idea, the idea is dead on arrival due to the limited capacity of L1 in the beginning.

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

“It's gas prices again [already] Reasonably low, raising the gas limit is not innovative.

Technical problems beyond the 40M gas limit

In a Dec. 9 post on Ethereum's research page, Wahrstetter shared that Ethereum's Consensus Layer (CL) client enforces a maximum uncompressed block size of 10 megabytes (MB) for efficient distribution across the network.

This restriction is critical to maintaining block distribution without introducing delays or instability.

According to Wahrstätter, the proposed increase to 60 million gas per block violates this limit, leading to transmission failures, missed verification gaps and network instability.

Dancrad Fest summarized the highly technical details in a December 11 post to X.

“The gas limit is directly controlled by validators. At each block, a validator votes to raise or lower the gas limit. So, unlike the EIP process, there is no ‘standard process' for raising the gas limit.”

“Now, the gas limit has *never* been known since the merger. However, before the merge, it was a proven practice that miners would not use this power arbitrarily, but typically only after the core devs confirmed that it was okay to switch.

“Unfortunately, the core devs found it unsafe to raise above 40m, so this hit a bit of a speed bump and had to be changed in customers first.”

However, FEST could raise the gas limit to more than 40M, but fierce debate among the development community has led to consensus that 36M is a good “starting point”.

“I think in the next few weeks some big pools will join and we'll see that increase,” he said.

Top Dev Base Signs “Intellectual Bottom” for Ethereum

The debate surrounding increasing gas limits on L1 and reinvigorating innovation has fueled Ethereum core developer Max Resnick's move to Solana, citing a stubborn developer community and Ethereum's reluctance to scale L1 as some of the reasons. The change.

Resnick has long been a critic of Ethereum's L2-based roadmap, which he says should be prioritized over expanding L1 to allow mainnet-based applications to survive and thrive.

For Awsika, Resnick's resignation and subsequent drama on social media — especially from Ethereum advocates — is what he calls “a sign of the times.”

“Max was one of the original developers of Ethereum, he was really brilliant, and he had a lot of big plans for the network.”

“And not only was he pushed, but when he left, there were a lot of people saying, ‘Good loss, he was a plant.' You know I can't control my anger when I see all that situation.

This marks the intellectual bottom of Ethereum.

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