Vitalik Buterin Argues for 10x Gas Limit Hike on Ethereum

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is calling for a ten-fold increase in the blockchain’s gas limit.

In a blog post on Feb. 14, Buterin said that even if most usage and applications are on Layer 2 (L2) chains, there is value in scaling the Layer 1 significantly.

Less than two weeks ago, Ethereum validators increased the gas limit by 20%.

What he is not doing, Buterin said, is arguing for or against having more applications on Ethereum’s mainnet. Rather, the benefits of a gas limit increase would be improved censorship resistance and lower costs.

By increasing the gas limit, the transaction capacity of each block is increased. That means you can fit more transactions, and more complex transactions, in each block. Doing so would lead to lower transaction fees, he said.

However, that also leads to state growth, making it more difficult to run a full node over time. That can lead to centralization if the hardware requirements become so onerous that small node operators drop out.

Censorship Resistance

Calling censorship resistance “one of the core value propositions of a blockchain,” Buterin pointed out that if a transaction is valid and offers a market-rate fee, it should be possible to get it onchain quickly. This matters even in short timeframes, he added, noting that just a five-minute delay during a volatile market could be enough to get a DeFi position liquidated.

He also cited an example of using a bypass transaction to overcome potential censorship on a Layer 2 chain. That would cost $4.50 at current gas prices. By scaling Layer 1 (L1) capacity, the costs could be driven down substantially, ensuring that transactions are processed quickly, even when the network is congested. He made similar calculations for moving an asset like an NFT between L2 networks.

“The practical value of the censorship resistance guarantee is dependent on (i) L1 fees being sufficiently low, and (ii) L1 having enough space that users can send bypass transactions even if an L2 censors a large number of users en masse,” he said.

Buterin also gives the example of an L2 mass exit situation, saying that at present, Ethereum might not be able to handle a mass withdrawal if a large L2 with millions of users collapses without scaling as much as 9x.

He outlines several other potential scenarios before concluding that “there is significant value to ~10x scaling of L1 gas even in an L2-dominated world.”