Author: ZHIXIONG PAN

In the past year, the Gas Limit of Ethereum blocks has rapidly increased from about 30 million to 60 million. This leap has been driven by multiple factors, including control over the worst-case size of blocks at the protocol level, significant optimizations in execution client performance, and systematic testing and validation for higher Gas limits.

In simple terms, developers have reduced the risks associated with raising the Gas limit by improving Ethereum's protocol rules, significantly enhancing the speed at which various clients can handle large blocks, and demonstrating that the network can still produce and propagate blocks on time under higher loads.

These efforts have allowed the Ethereum mainnet to transition from being hesitant to raise the Gas limit to now being able to safely increase the limit to 60M Gas. Below, we will explain the concept and history of the Gas Limit in detail, then delve into the core reasons for the increase in the Gas Limit, and finally look ahead to the conditions needed for further expansion.

Gas Limit and Blob: Definitions and Differences

The Gas Limit is a parameter in Ethereum that measures the maximum computational workload within each block, specifically the upper limit on the total amount of Gas that can be consumed for transaction execution in a block. The higher the Gas Limit, the more transactions a single block can accommodate, leading to greater on-chain throughput. However, the downside is that a higher Gas Limit increases the burden on network participants: block validators need to package and broadcast larger blocks within a fixed block time, and all nodes in the network must download and execute larger blocks, resulting in increased network bandwidth and hardware pressure on nodes.

Blob, on the other hand, is a different type of block content introduced as a new element to expand Ethereum's data availability. The Blob comes from the EIP-4844 proposal, which allows for the temporary accommodation of large amounts of binary data for Layer 2 use within blocks, with its cost measurement independent of the Gas consumption of regular transactions. In simple terms, Blob provides additional space specifically for L2 Rollup data, while the Gas Limit measures the upper limit of conventional EVM computation. The two are not directly comparable: increasing the number of Blobs primarily affects the capacity for attaching L2 data in blocks, while increasing the Gas Limit directly increases the computational capacity for executing transactions on L1.

This article focuses on the topic of the Gas Limit, while changes in Blob capacity will not be elaborated upon.

Historical Background: Why Was There Hesitation to Raise the Gas Limit?

In the early days of Ethereum, there was a cautious attitude towards raising the block Gas limit. After the implementation of EIP-1559 in 2021, Ethereum set the block Gas target at around 15 million (with a maximum of about 30 million per block), and it remained unchanged for several years. The reasons for this were that several key bottlenecks had not yet been resolved, and hastily raising the Gas limit could jeopardize network security and decentralization:

• Execution Performance: Can client software execute more transactions quickly enough? If blocks are too large, nodes may not be able to complete execution and validation within the block interval, potentially missing timely block production or causing chain splits.
• Network Propagation: Larger blocks need to be broadcast across the network within a 12-second block cycle, especially needing to be received by a majority of validators within 4 seconds to submit proof of stake on time. Overly large blocks may experience propagation delays, leading to consensus issues.
• State Growth: Higher throughput will accelerate the inflation of Ethereum's global state (ledger data), increasing the synchronization and storage burden on nodes, which could weaken the network's decentralization in the long term.
• Hardware Requirements: The cumulative effect of the above factors means that the hardware configuration required to run nodes increases. If ordinary users cannot keep up with their home computers, a higher Gas limit may lead to network centralization among a few high-performance nodes, which is detrimental to decentralization.

Due to these concerns, the Gas limit on the Ethereum mainnet remained stable for a long time, not easily surpassing the 30 million level. Especially with the rise of Rollups, a large number of transactions compressed data through low-cost calldata to be published on L1, causing the average size of Ethereum blocks to gradually approach the limit, with extreme cases reaching several megabytes of data in a single block.

Without other improvements, raising the Gas limit would only further amplify block size and performance issues. Therefore, the Ethereum community chose to primarily rely on Layer 2 scaling rather than hastily increasing the Gas limit on L1.

Core Reasons for the Rapid Increase in Gas Limit Today

So, why has Ethereum been able to rapidly increase the Gas limit by more than double while maintaining security after entering 2025? The fundamental reasons lie in the simultaneous implementation of several technical improvements that have cleared the obstacles to scaling.

Protocol Upgrades to Limit Worst-Case Block Size

Ethereum has introduced new protocol rules to reduce the upper limit of "worst-case" block sizes. A key aspect is the EIP-7623 proposal, which significantly reduces the amount of cheap data that a single block can contain in extreme cases by increasing the Gas cost of calldata in transactions.

Before the implementation of EIP-7623, attackers could fill a block with data of up to several MB using an ultra-low calldata Gas price; after the price increase, the same amount of data would consume more Gas, effectively lowering the block size limit and alleviating the issue of "discrepancy between average and extreme block sizes."

This change ensures that even with an increased overall Gas Limit, the overall byte size of blocks will not inflate uncontrollably, thus providing a safety margin for raising the Gas limit. In other words, the protocol layer actively tightened the data layer's expenses, ensuring that "computational load doubles, but block size does not double," laying the foundation for later increasing the Gas limit from 30 million to 60 million.

At the same time, the mainnet began to introduce dedicated Blob data transactions for Rollups in EIP-4844, further reducing Rollups' reliance on cheap calldata. As Rollup data gradually shifted from regular Gas space to Blob space, the conventional block Gas became more concentrated on actual contract computations, resulting in "lighter" average blocks, which also indirectly created more favorable conditions for increasing the Gas limit.

Significant Optimizations in Client Performance

Various Ethereum execution client teams have conducted in-depth performance benchmarking and optimizations, significantly enhancing the speed of processing large blocks. The Gas benchmarking framework led by teams like Nethermind fills blocks with a single type of instruction or precompiled contract to stress-test the clients' maximum processing capabilities (measured in "million Gas per second").

Through this unified benchmark, developers identified and fixed some previously hidden execution bottlenecks. For example, it was found during testing that certain extreme cases of the "Modular Exponentiation" (ModExp) precompiled function took far longer than its Gas pricing, becoming a common bottleneck for all mainstream clients.

In response to these findings, the community quickly proposed EIP-7883 to reprice the Gas for the ModExp precompiled function and coordinated client optimization algorithms. Additionally, other time-consuming cryptographic operations (such as BLS12-381 elliptic curve calculations, BN256, hashing, etc.) were also optimized or repriced by client teams.

Statistics show that after a cross-client "Berlin Interop" performance sprint in mid-2025, the block processing speed of each execution client in the worst-case scenario significantly improved, with most operations reaching a processing level of about 20 million Gas per second.

In conversion, if a client can execute 20 million Gas per second, it could theoretically handle blocks of up to 80M Gas within the 4-second PoS block interval. This means that raising the block limit to 60M Gas is still within a safe margin.

These performance improvements have alleviated previous concerns about "execution speed not keeping up with the Gas limit," ensuring that even if blocks contain double the previous transaction volume, clients can complete validation within the specified time without missing consensus deadlines due to slow execution.

Comprehensive Testing to Validate Network Propagation Limits

Before implementing any increase in the mainnet Gas limit, developers conducted extensive testing on multiple dedicated networks to ensure that larger blocks could still be propagated in a timely manner and accepted by the vast majority of nodes.

For example, in 2025, Ethereum developers raised the block Gas limit to 60M on the test networks Sepolia and the newly developed network Hoodi, continuously monitoring network performance metrics. The results showed that even with blocks using the maximum 60M Gas, block proposals in these networks could still be packaged on time and quickly propagated through the P2P network: 90% of nodes received the block within about 0.7 to 1.0 seconds after it was generated, and almost all nodes completed validation and accepted the block as the new chain head within 4 seconds.

In other words, even if the Gas consumption of blocks doubles, the blocks can still be propagated across the network before the 4-second deadline for proof submission set by Ethereum. During these stress tests, developers monitored key data such as whether proposing nodes produced blocks on time and the time distribution required for all network nodes to accept new blocks, with no significant anomalies found.

Due to differences in state scale and node topology between the test networks and the mainnet, developers remained cautiously optimistic, but the test results proved that 60M Gas blocks are feasible both theoretically and in engineering terms. At the same time, to ensure the security of the consensus layer, developers also considered limitations at the beacon chain level (for example, the beacon chain network layer currently has a ~10MB single block Gossip propagation limit). By reducing the byte size of individual blocks through the aforementioned EIP-7623 and avoiding the simultaneous occurrence of too many penalty transactions and other worst-case scenarios, the execution load of 60M Gas did not reach these limits.

Overall, various tests and adjustments have given the core team a solid grasp of the risks involved in raising the mainnet Gas limit from 30 million to 60 million, boosting their confidence. After most validators expressed support (with about 150,000+ validating nodes voting in favor of the increase), Ethereum finally began to raise the mainnet Gas limit in 2025, planning to officially adjust the default value to 60M in subsequent upgrades.

Future Outlook: What Is Needed for Further Increases?

The Ethereum community does not intend to stop at 60M Gas. In subsequent upgrade plans such as Fusaka, developers have outlined a path to continue raising the block Gas limit to 100M and even higher. To achieve this goal, there are still several technical challenges that need to be addressed or continuously monitored:

• Further optimization of heavy computational operations: As mentioned earlier regarding the ModExp algorithm, the bottleneck has been largely eliminated through EIP-7883 repricing and client optimizations. However, to support blocks at the 100M level, it may be necessary to optimize or add dedicated acceleration for other high Gas-consuming cryptographic operations (such as elliptic curve signature verification, zero-knowledge proof verification, etc.). Fortunately, client teams have already begun collaborating in these areas, adjusting the implementation of BN256 elliptic curve-related precompiles during testing in 2025 to ensure performance no longer holds back progress. It is foreseeable that as Ethereum introduces more high-performance cryptographic primitives (even considering native support for STARKs, etc.), execution bottlenecks will continue to be broken, clearing the way for raising the Gas limit.

• Controlling state growth and node costs: A higher Gas limit means that on-chain state may grow faster. If not addressed, the difficulty of storing and synchronizing new nodes for full nodes will significantly increase in a few years. Ethereum developers are already researching state growth issues, such as proposing state rent or periodically pruning historical states to avoid endless inflation. However, these longer-term mechanisms are still in the discussion phase. In the short term, as the Gas limit increases, node operators may need to upgrade hardware (such as faster SSDs and larger memory) more frequently to keep up with the growing state and data volume. The community emphasizes that while raising the Gas limit, it will not sacrifice decentralization, so each step of scaling will be carefully evaluated for its impact on ordinary nodes until state management solutions mature.

• Improvements to the consensus layer and network protocol optimization: If larger blocks of 100M Gas or more are to be supported in the future, some consensus and network parameters may need to be adjusted. For example, the current beacon chain blocks have an overall size limit that includes execution load, Blob data, and proof data. Developers may need to increase the message size limit at the P2P layer or reduce the latency of large blocks through techniques such as compression and sharding propagation. Additionally, Ethereum is introducing PeerDAS (peer-to-peer data sampling network) to handle the efficient propagation of Blob data, which will alleviate some of the pressure on execution layer block propagation. After ensuring the safe operation of 60M+ Gas on the execution layer, improvements to the data layer and network layer will become the focus of the next phase of scaling.

Looking ahead, as long as the improvements in the above areas progress in sync, further increasing the Gas limit on the Ethereum mainnet is not an unattainable goal. Developers have already validated the feasibility of raising the limit from 36M to 45M and 60M on the testnet, and plans are underway to move towards 100M. It is important to emphasize that the Ethereum community maintains a consistently cautious attitude towards scaling: each increase will be "tested first, then implemented on the mainnet," only after confirming that it will not jeopardize network security and decentralization.

Overall, the significant increase in the Gas Limit over the past year is the result of collaborative innovation across multiple domains: reducing risks at the protocol layer, enhancing performance at the client level, and providing confidence through testing data. Supported by these efforts, Ethereum has successfully taken an important step in L1 scaling and laid the foundation for continuing to increase capacity and support more applications in the future.

References

https://ethpandaops.io/posts/60m-gas-sepolia-hoodi/

https://ethpandaops.io/posts/gaslimit-scaling/

https://www.nethermind.io/blog/measuring-ethereums-execution-limits-the-gas-benchmarking-framework

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