Ethereum Foundation researchers, co-founders of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter, have presented suggestions to limit the maximum gas that a single transaction can use. Proposal, EIP 7983, argues:
“Implementing this limit allows Ethereum to increase resilience to specific DOS (rejection of service attacks) vectors, improve network stability, and provide more predictability for transaction processing costs.”
The latest proposal is an amended version of the EIP 7825, which was introduced last November but has since stagnated.
The proposal limits gas usage for individual transactions to 16.77 million gas
The proposal aims to implement a maximum limit of 16.77 million gas for one transaction, which is almost half of the 30 million gas limit proposed under EIP 7825. This limit applies regardless of the block gas limit set by the miner or validator, according to Buterin and Wahrstätter.
Implementation of this proposal will void transactions specifying gas limits above 16.77 million gas. This means that during transaction verification, transactions that exceed the gas limit will be rejected and excluded from the transaction pool. Similarly, during block verification, blocks containing transactions exceeding the set gas limit will be invalidated.
The 16.77 million gas limit chosen by Buterin and Wahrstätter “provides a balance with allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution boundaries” according to the proposal. The author added:
“This value enables most current use cases, such as contract deployments and advanced defi interactions, ensuring consistent performance characteristics.”
If implemented, this proposal requires users and distributed applications (DAPP) to split transactions with higher gas limits into smaller operations. However, Buterin and Wahrstätter expect limits to affect the minimum number of users and DAPP, as most current transactions are well below the proposed limit.
Why setting transaction gas limits is important
Ethereum’s current architecture allows trades that theoretically consume the entire gas limit of a block. There are several risks to this architecture.
For example, allowing a single transaction to consume most or all of the block gas limits makes it easier for scoundrels to carry out DOS attacks. In the DOS attack, bad actors try to overwhelm the network through a barrage of spam transactions. This prevents the network from serving real users.
According to the proposal, the absence of transaction gas limits can also lead to non-uniform load distributions, which can affect network stability.
Variable gas usage can lead to load distribution imbalances across transactions within a block. Additionally, higas transactions can have longer block validation times and can affect the user experience.
Benefits of setting transaction gas limits
According to Buterin and Wahrstätter, limiting the gas usage limit for a single trade can reduce the risk of a single trade DOS attack. Essentially, the limit sets up guardrails that prevent malicious actors from using network bandwidth through large spam transactions.
The restrictions also ensure that gas is allocated fairly to the entire transaction within the block, the proposal states. The cap is also expected to make the block validation “more predictable and uniform.”
However, the most important advantage is improved compatibility with Zero Knowledge Virtual Machines (ZKVM). Encouraging transactions with heavy gas limits will allow for “more predictable ZKVM circuit design” to “enable better participation in distributed certification systems,” the proposal states.