Vitalik Buterin proposes lower ETH transaction gas limit through a new EIP

Vitalik Buterin along with fellow researcher Toni Wahrstätter have proposed EIP 7983 which caps the Ethereum transaction gas limit to 16.77 million or (2^24). 

The proposal was created on GitHub in late June and was finalized today. EIP 7983 states that the gas limit will affect the Ethereum network at the protocol level. The new gas cap will help in securing and stabilizing the Ethereum network while making transaction costs more predictable. 

EIP 7983 will protect the network from DoS attacks

Theoretically, a single transaction on the Ethereum network could consume the entire block’s gas limit. For example, a smart contract interaction might fill a block completely, leaving no room for other transactions. This could pose several risks including denial-of-service (DoS) attacks which impact the Ethereum network stability.

Capping the gas limit will break transactions into smaller fragments, hence improving zkVM compatibility. This design change will lead to faster zero-knowledge proofs and more participants to help verify work. In addition, a stable gas usage will balance parallel execution across threads in future Ethereum scaling models.

Overall, having a maximum gas limit of 16.77 million will help stop denial-of-service attacks, make zkVMs easier to design, and allow gas to be shared more fairly between transactions in each block.

EIP-7983 further states that the transaction cap limit will be enforced regardless of the block gas limit set by validators. Moreover, any transaction that exceeds the gas limit of 16.77 million will be rejected with a specific error code. 

According to the proposal, the EVM behavior will change and will not include any transaction with a gas limit more than 16.77 million in the txpool. A txpool is defined as a waiting room for ETH transactions. At the block validation level and before the processing stage, the EVM will reject any block that has a transaction with a gas limit greater than the specified limit. 

Why 16.77 million Ethereum gas limit?

In the proposal, Buterin and Wahrstätter wrote that the transaction gas limit of 16.77 million or (2^24) “provides a balance between allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution bounds.” Selecting this value will make use cases like smart contract deployments and complex DeFi transactions run smoothly without causing unpredictable slowdowns.

EIP-7983 is not the first proposal to introduce a cap on ETH gas limit. EIP-7825 was the first proposal to introduce a gas limit for Ethereum transactions of 30 million. The proposal was published in November of last year and the 30 million gas cap was selected at the time because it is based on the average size of Ethereum blocks today. Many Ethereum developers supported EIP-7825 however they pushed for a lower gas limit. 

According to the Gas Tracker on Ether Scan, the average Ethereum gas cost is 0.266 gwei while ETH is priced at around $2,550. At the time of writing, a transaction that uses the full 16.77 million gas would cost approximately $11.38. 

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