Vitalik Buterin touts ‘safe’ scaling as Ethereum gas limit ticks up

Ethereum's per-block gas limit has begun to rise as validators representing nearly a majority of staked ETH signal their support to "pump the gas", allowing for higher transaction throughput on the Layer 1 blockchain. 

Several Ethereum blocks on Sunday afternoon were proposed with a gas limit above 39 million units, an 8% rise from the 36 million prior limit. The gas limit has been 36 million since February, when it was raised for the first time in over three years from its prior value of 30 million. 

Ethereum's gas serves as a measure of the computational and storage work demanded by transactions or smart contracts on the network. The gas limit caps the amount of processing power demanded by any one block, ensuring the blockchain can still operate in periods of high demand. 

Raising the gas limit serves to increase throughput on the network during times of high activity, since more transactions can be included in each block, proposed roughly every twelve seconds. However, larger gas limits can make it more difficult for smaller validators to run nodes, given the increased processing costs. 

"If the gas limit is raised too high we could create a scenario where the chain becomes too large for solo node operators to validate and download," representatives of the "pump the gas" effort have written. "Technology improves however and it does make sense to slowly increase it as time goes on."

Once validators signal their desire to increase the block limit, the limit automatically rises; each block can adjust the limit by around 0.1% of the previous total. According to the dashboard gaslimit.pics, around 48% of staked ETH is currently running clients whose gas limit target is 45 million units or higher, so the blocks they propose vote the limit upward. The initiative has been promoted among certain Ethereum communities as a call to "pump the gas." 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin flagged the move in an X post on Sunday. "Almost exactly 50% of stake is voting to increase the L1 gas limit to 45m," he noted.

Buterin also highlighted a recent version of Geth, the most popular Ethereum node client with a 54% market share, which reduced the storage size of a pruned archive node by about 90%, from over 20 TB to around 2 TB. Buterin called the effort, "...recent hard work by the Geth team that makes these kinds of scale increases safe." 

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