Reddit AMA | Vitalik Buterin calls for increasing Gas limit to improve throughput

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Ethereum Reddit 11th AMA

The Ethereum Foundation research team held another Ask Me Anything (AMA) event on the American forum Reddit, following the one in July last year. Co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin's argument to increase the Gas limit has attracted attention.

Vitalik Buterin: Moderately Increase Gas Limit

Vitalik pointed out that Ethereum has not increased the Gas limit for nearly three years, breaking Ethereum's historical record. Therefore, he believes that a moderate increase in the Gas limit is reasonable.

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Increasing Gas Limit to 40 million

Since the launch of Ethereum in 2015, the average Gas limit has been around 3 million and has been continuously adjusted over time. After the implementation of the London hard fork and the introduction of EIP-1559 in August 2021, it has significantly increased to around 30 million. Vitalik hopes to adjust it to around 40 million, an increase of about 33%.

What is Ethereum Gas Limit?

The Ethereum Gas limit refers to the maximum amount of Gas spent on executing transactions or smart contracts in each block. Currently, this means that the Gas amount for all transactions in a single Ethereum block cannot exceed 30 million.

The setting of the limit is to ensure that the block capacity does not become too large and affect network performance. Increasing the Gas limit is to allow each block to accommodate more transactions, increasing the overall network throughput, but it also increases hardware load and potential risks such as spam attacks.

Due to the popularity of NFTs, Ethereum Gas fees soared to a yearly high of 150 Gwei in May last year, once again highlighting Ethereum's scalability issues.