As Ethereum’s gas limit increases, Vitalik emphasizes “safe” scaling

PANews reported on July 21 that according to The Block, the validators representing nearly half of the Ethereum staked support "raising the gas limit". Under this impetus, the gas limit of each Ethereum block has begun to increase, which will increase the transaction throughput of the Layer 1 blockchain. On Sunday afternoon, multiple blocks proposed to set the gas limit to more than 39 million units, an increase of 8% from the previous 36 million. This is also the first time that the upper limit has been raised from 30 million in three years. Representatives of the "Raise Gas Limit" action believe that raising the upper limit too much will make the chain too large and increase the difficulty of verification and downloading for individual node operators. However, as technology advances, it is reasonable to gradually increase it. Once a validator expresses the desire to increase the block upper limit, the upper limit will automatically rise, and each block can adjust the upper limit to about 0.1% of the total amount of the previous block. According to gaslimit.pics, about 48% of the clients running the staked Ethereum currently set a gas upper limit target of 45 million units or higher.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin mentioned this move in the X post, pointing out that “nearly 50% of the staked shares voted in favor of increasing the gas limit of Layer 1 to 45 million.” At the same time, he also praised Geth’s recent version update for reducing the storage capacity of the pruning archive node by about 90%, saying that this was “the recent hard work of the Geth team to make such expansion increases safe and feasible.”