A four-year plan to increase Ethereum’s gas limit by 100-fold has been pitched by Ethereum’s Dankrad Feist, with the potential to theoretically raise the blockchain’s TPS to 2,000.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist presented a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) that could theoretically increase the gas limit of the Ethereum mainnet by 100-fold, enabling it to reach 2,000 transactions per second.
Feist put forward EIP-9698 on April 27, proposing a “deterministic gas limit growth schedule” starting at epoch 369017, or around June 1. He also introduced the blockchain’s “danksharding” data storage solution, naming it after himself.
The proposal plans to gradually increase the gas limit by a factor of 10 over approximately two years, or 164,250 epochs, followed by a final tenfold increase at the end of that period.
Feist stated that Ethereum clients would need to cast a vote for the proposal to take effect.
He added that this EIP encourages a predictable exponential growth pattern as a client default, aiming to foster a sustainable and transparent gas limit trajectory aligned with anticipated advancements in hardware and protocol efficiency.
With Ethereum occasionally reaching up to 20 TPS in blocks dominated by simple transactions, a 100x increase in the gas limit could theoretically raise Ethereum’s TPS to 2,000. The Ethereum community views Feist’s proposal as a way to better position the network to compete with Solana, which currently processes a non-vote TPS between 800 and 1,050, with a theoretical TPS of 65,000.
EIP-9678 Proposes Gas Limit Expansion
The EIP proposes expanding the current gas limit from 36 million to 3.6 billion, potentially allowing Ethereum blocks to accommodate around 6,000 transactions.
In February, Ethereum validators agreed to raise the gas limit from 30 million to 36 million, following Feist’s proposal.
Ethereum developers last changed the gas limit in August 2021 during the London hard fork, roughly doubling it from 15 million to 30 million.
Feist acknowledged that a rapid increase in the gas limit under his proposal could stress less-optimized nodes and lead to longer block propagation times.
He said that the exponential schedule, with very gradual increments per epoch, gives node operators and developers ample time to adapt and optimize.
The Ethereum community views EIP-9698 as its latest effort to enhance scalability at the base layer, following several years of focusing on scaling through layer 2 solutions.
Critics of Ethereum’s layer-2 focused strategy claim that the ecosystem has fragmented into several siloed chains with limited interoperability, leading to a diminished user experience.
Ethereum developers are also testing a fourfold increase in the gas limit under EIP-9678 as part of the Fusaka hard fork.
Analysts expect Fusaka to potentially go online in late 2025, while developers plan to launch the next major Ethereum upgrade, Pectra, on the mainnet in May.
