Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, and researcher Toni Wahrstätter, have submitted a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-7983) aimed at reducing gas usage per transaction.
The proposal includes protocol-level limitations that allow each transaction to use up to 16.77 million gas (2^24). The goal is to increase the network’s resilience to denial of service (DOS) attacks, provide a more stable network structure, and increase predictability of transaction pricing.
According to the new proposal, trades will not be able to exceed 16.77 million gas on their own, regardless of block gas limits set by the network. This limit is applied by the Ethereum client during the transaction validation phase, and transactions exceeding this limit are considered invalid and are not included in the transaction pool. Similarly, blocks containing transactions exceeding this limit are considered invalid.
The following items stand out in the details of proposals that have “draft” status on GitHub.
- Gas Cap: 16.77 million gas caps apply to all transactions.
- Effectiveness of Txpool: Ethereum transactions exceeding this limit will be rejected during the verification stage.
- Block validity: Blocks containing transactions exceeding the gas limit are considered invalid.
- Independence: This transactional limit is not directly related to block gas limits. Blocks may contain higher total gas limits, but no single transaction exceeding 1677 million.
The justification of the proposal includes three main points:
- Reduce DOS attacks: Eliminate risks such as a single transaction that consumes all block gas and maintain a balanced network.
- ZKVM compatibility: Structures divided into smaller processes are more suitable for zero knowledge proof (ZK proof) systems.
- Parallel Transaction Performance: ETH Fixed Gas Limits provide a more balanced workload distribution in running parallel transactions.
- According to Buterin and Wahrstätter, the 16.77 million limit is high enough to support both existing Defi applications and contract deployments, but is sufficient to keep the system’s performance predictable and secure.
*This is not investment advice.