Ethereum Developers Express Worries Regarding Vitalik’s Proposal to Raise Gas Limit

Crypto News- The Ethereum community finds itself in a state of disagreement over Vitalik Buterin’s recent proposal to increase the gas limit, causing tension among developers, node operators, and users. On January 11, Buterin advocated for a modest 33% increase, aiming to boost the network’s throughput and overall capacity from the current 30 million to 40 million transactions per block.

Ethereum Developers Express Worries Regarding Vitalik’s Proposal to Raise Gas Limit

In a blog post titled “Why increasing the gas limit is difficult,” Ethereum developer Marius van der Wijden expressed reservations about the potential expansion of the blockchain state, which includes account balances and smart contract data. The current size of approximately 267 gigabytes (GB) raises concerns for Wijden, who warned that an increase in the gas limit could further amplify the size, leading to slower access and modification.

While Wijden acknowledged manageable storage costs, he stressed the absence of concrete solutions for managing state growth. Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann and Ethereum team lead Péter Szilágyi echoed these concerns, highlighting worries about increased bandwidth, synchronization times, and potential security risks associated with higher gas limits.

Ethereum Gas Limit Debate: Diverging Opinions on Vitalik’s Proposal Spark Community Discord

Szilágyi remarked, “Increasing it definitely has a downside. State will grow faster, sync time will get slower quicker, DoS potential will grow.” The gas limit plays a critical role in maintaining network performance by capping the maximum work and gas spent on executing transactions or smart contracts in each block.

In the face of these concerns, proposed solutions such as EIP-4444 and EIP-4844 aim to address chain history expiration and improve rollup data availability. However, software developer Micah Zoltu cautioned against a narrow focus on machine specifications, urging a broader goal of enabling diverse demographics to run Ethereum nodes as the network’s state and blockchain size continue to expand over time.