Ethereum Gas Limit increased to 60 million, network performance significantly enhanced

The Ethereum network is undergoing significant improvements. In the past, it was commonly believed that Ethereum's transaction processing capacity was only 15 transactions per second (TPS). However, after continuous optimization, the peak TPS of Ethereum has now been raised to around 60, an increase of 4 times.

This significant improvement is mainly due to the adjustment of the Gas Limit. The Gas Limit refers to the maximum amount of Gas that each block can accommodate, which directly affects the network's transaction processing capacity. Recently, Ethereum plans to further increase the Gas Limit from 36 million to 60 million.

Increasing the Gas Limit is an efficient scaling method that does not require a hard fork. This is because the Gas Limit is a dynamic parameter of Ethereum, which PoS nodes can adjust under the existing protocol rules. The producer of each new block can adjust the Gas Limit within a range of ±1/1024 relative to the parent block, which is itself part of the consensus mechanism.

Currently, about 15% of validators have chosen to support the 60 million Gas setting. This adjustment process is voluntary, so a significant number of nodes still maintain the configuration of the old version.

It is worth noting that increasing the Gas Limit does not mean that PoS nodes can earn more rewards. In fact, due to enhanced network processing capacity and reduced transaction congestion, validators' income may decrease. Therefore, choosing validators that support raising the Gas Limit can be said to contribute to the development of the network.

Recently, the community proposed a proposal named EIP-9698, suggesting to increase the Gas Limit from 36 million to 3.6 billion over the next four years, with the goal of raising Ethereum's TPS to about 2000. However, this proposal is considered too radical.

Although in theory the Gas Limit can be continuously increased, in practice it is necessary to consider that the Ethereum network has over 1 million active validators, requiring a balance of broad participation. In contrast, some high-performance public chains have only a few hundred validators, highlighting a significant gap between the two.

According to research by ethpandaops, when the Gas Limit is raised to 60 million, about 90% of blocks can be discovered for the first time within 1016 milliseconds. Although the block propagation delay has slightly increased, it is still within an acceptable range.

However, 66% of the nodes in the Ethereum network need to fully receive the blocks and their accompanying blob data within 4 seconds for the blocks to be considered valid. Based on this propagation limit, the theoretical upper limit of the Gas Limit calculated by the testnet is approximately 150 million. Therefore, under the current architecture, the short-term goals of EIP-9698 are difficult to achieve.

In the future, if Ethereum implements a "large node/small node" architecture, for example allowing nodes that stake 2048 ETH to handle higher loads while 32 ETH nodes handle smaller blocks, it may create new possibilities for further scaling.

In summary, the Ethereum network is becoming faster, more efficient, and more user-friendly. This not only reflects market changes but also demonstrates the continuous optimization and progress of Ethereum itself.