Ethereum Faces Technical Challenges With Gas Limit Expansion

According to Odaily, Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter recently highlighted the technical challenges associated with expanding the Ethereum block gas limit, urging the community to remain patient. The Ethereum community is currently discussing the possibility of increasing the gas limit, a change that could enhance network capacity but also pose risks to stability and security. Wahrstätter emphasized the limitations related to the consensus layer (CL) client specifications, noting that without significant protocol upgrades, surpassing the current 36 million gas threshold is not feasible. Meanwhile, Ethereum developers are preparing for the Pectra 2 network upgrade to address these challenges. This hard fork includes two key proposals aimed at laying the groundwork for higher gas limits. The first proposal, EIP-7623, seeks to reduce the worst-case block size by mitigating DoS risks and achieving a safer capacity increase. The second proposal, EIP-7691, aims to increase the target and maximum number of blobs per block, providing empirical data on network performance under higher storage and propagation demands.