Ethereum transaction speed will increase with another gas limit increase

Transaction volume on the Ethereum network is set to increase again next month, with developers planning to increase Ethereum's gas limit from 60 million to 80 million in January.

Kristen Kim, vice president of Galaxy Digital Research Group, shared a summary of the All Core Developers meeting held on Monday, in which Nethermind representatives said that developers should be ready to increase the gas limit after the next BPO dry fork on January 7.

Barnabas Bussa, developer operations engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, however, stated that two client-level optimizations are needed before further increases can be made to the block gas limit – namely partial blob responses on the execution layer and the maximum blobs flag on the consensus layer.

Increasing the gas limit directly increases the amount of transactions and smart contracts that go into each Ethereum block, reducing fees and increasing overall consumption.

Raising Ethereum's gas limit to 80 million won't match the speed or low costs of Layer 1s like Solana or Sui, strengthening Ethereum's appeal as a secure settlement and execution layer without significantly compromising decentralization – arguably its biggest advantage over its competitors.

Ethereum devs confirm plans at the beginning of the new year

After the second BPO dry fork, participants will gather again on January 5 at the weekly Ethereum All Core Developers Meeting to confirm when they will increase the gas limit.

The first BPO hard fork came on December 9th, which increased Blob capacity by 66%. A second hard fork on January 7 is expected to increase this by another 66%.

Blobs on Ethereum store transactions and aggregated data off-chain, reducing gas costs and increasing scalability without overwhelming the network.

Increasing the Ethereum gas limit is a priority this year.

In order to expand the execution capacity of the network, the increase of the gas limit of Ethereum has been the main focus of developers and researchers this year, which is in three increments.

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The first happened at the beginning of February, which increased from 30 million to 35 million. The second was held in July and increased to 45 million. And the third happened at the end of November, reaching 60 million.

Members of the Ethereum developer and research community have expressed their shared goal of increasing the network's gas limit to 180 million by the end of 2026.

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