The Great Gas Limit Debate: A Fight for Ethereum’s Future
The Ethereum community is engaged in a heated debate over whether or not to raise the gas limits on the Ethereum mainnet by as much as 100%. The gas limit refers to the maximum amount of gas that’s allowed to be spent for transactions to be included in a single Ethereum block. This discussion has sparked a contentious divide among developers and influencers, with some advocating for a significant increase while others warn against the potential risks.
Why Raise Gas Limits?
Emmanuel Awosika, Creative Director at 2077 Collective, sheds light on the core concept behind raising gas limits. According to him, Ethereum needs to demonstrate its willingness to push boundaries and provide developers with the capacity to deploy ambitious projects without worrying about gas prices skyrocketing.
"Right now — with such a low gas limit — there are certain applications you can’t really deploy because the moment those applications go viral, gas prices will spike and it becomes a very degraded user experience," Awosika explains. "Having higher capacity means more developers have the confidence to deploy stuff on the L1 and not get priced out arbitrarily."
The Debate: Scaling Up vs. L2-Centric Roadmap
At the heart of this debate is whether Ethereum should scale up to enable high-value DeFi activity or push most such activity to Layer 2s (L2s) given its limited ability to scale while remaining decentralized and credibly neutral.
While many developers have focused on the L2-centric roadmap, Awosika argues that the pendulum has swung too far. He advocates for an ideal version of the Ethereum roadmap where high-value applications reside on the L1, such as Uniswap, which requires significant security, with less critical activity relegated to L2s.
"The ideal version of the Ethereum roadmap is where you still have high-value applications on the L1, things like Uniswap that require lots of security and then you can leave a lot of the other stuff to the L2s," Awosika emphasizes. "There should always be this focus on making sure the L1 has a lot of valuable stuff on it. This is what makes Ethereum fundamentally different from Bitcoin, which is designed to be left as it is at the base layer."
The Technical Complications
Toni Wahrstätter, an Ethereum Foundation developer, highlights the technical complications associated with increasing gas limits beyond 40 million. According to him, a proposed increase to 60 million would breach the maximum uncompressed block size limit of 10 mebibyte (MiB) enforced by the consensus layer (CL) client.
"This restriction is crucial to maintaining block propagation without introducing delays or instability," Wahrstätter warns. "A higher gas limit would lead to propagation failures, missed validator slots, and ultimately destabilize the network."
The Tacit Agreement on 36M
Despite the technical challenges, some developers have advocated for a more modest increase of up to 40 million gas limits. Max Feist, an Ethereum developer, explains that even though raising gas limits above 40M is technically feasible, the debate has led to a tacit agreement among the development community to make 36M the default.
"I think it’s likely that some big pools will join in the next few weeks and we’ll see this increase," Feist predicts.
Max Resnick’s Departure: A Sign of Intellectual Decline?
The gas limit debate comes at a time when Ethereum core developer Max Resnick announced his departure for Solana, citing a rigid development community and a lack of willingness to scale the Ethereum L1. Resnick has long been a critic of Ethereum’s L2-focused roadmap.
"Max is one of the earliest Ethereum developers, he was actually brilliant, and he had a lot of really ambitious plans for the network," Awosika says. "And not only did he get sort of pushed out, but when he actually left, a lot of people were like, ‘good riddance, he was a plant.’ Seeing all of that unfold, you know, I could barely control my rage."
This development has led some to speculate about the intellectual bottom for Ethereum.
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