Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the ethereum Foundation, called for patience in addressing the expansion of ethereum's block gas limit, citing technical challenges in a December 9 report. mail.
The discussion comes as the ethereum community debates raising the gas limit, a change that could improve network capacity but also poses risks to stability and security.
Wahrstätter highlighted limitations linked to the consensus layer (CL) client specifications, which make exceeding the current 36 million gas threshold infeasible without significant protocol updates.
Beyond the threshold of 36 million
ethereum's CL specifications enforce a maximum uncompressed block size of 10 mebibytes (MiB) for efficient propagation of gossip across the network. This constraint is vital to maintain block propagation without introducing delays or instability.
A proposed increase to 60 million gas per block would violate this limit, resulting in propagation failures, loss of validation slots, and potential network destabilization.
These limitations, while restrictive, are designed to mitigate risks such as denial of service (DoS) attacks, as larger blocks could overwhelm network nodes and expose vulnerabilities without offering immediate benefits.
Blocks of up to 36 million gas are kept within acceptable gossip size limits, ensuring smooth propagation and consensus stability. However, exceeding this threshold risks creating valid blocks that do not propagate, disrupting validators and reducing network efficiency.
The lack of empirical data on network performance under higher gas limits further complicates the situation. Core developers emphasize the need to take a cautious approach to avoid undermining the security and reliability of ethereum.
Parithosh Jayanthi, member of the ethereum Foundation's ethPandaOps unit, echoed the sentiment and urged developers to prioritize testing and data collection to evaluate the pros and cons of higher gas limits.
Pectra offers a path to higher gas limits
ethereum developers are preparing the Pectra 2 network upgrade to address these challenges. This hard fork includes two critical proposals designed to lay the groundwork for higher gas limits.
The first is ethereum Improvement Proposal 7623 (EIP-7623), which reduces worst-case block sizes by mitigating DoS risks and enabling more secure capacity increases.
The second is EIP-7691, which increases the target and maximum number of blobs per block, providing empirical data on network performance under increased storage and propagation demands. Blobs are block spaces dedicated to receiving data from Layer 2 blockchains.
By implementing these changes, Pectra 2 will provide crucial information about the network's ability to handle larger blocks while maintaining stability.
