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.
Under a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) presented by Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist, the gas limit of the Ethereum mainnet could be theoretically increased by 100-fold, allowing it to reach 2,000 transactions per second.
EIP-9698 was put forward by Feist on April 27, proposing a “deterministic gas limit growth schedule” starting at epoch 369017, or around June 1. The blockchain’s “danksharding” data storage solution, named after him, was also introduced.
The gas limit would be gradually increased by a factor of 10 over approximately two years, or 164,250 epochs, at which point a final tenfold increase would take place.
It was stated by Feist that a vote would need to be cast by Ethereum clients for the proposal to take effect.
A predictable exponential growth pattern is encouraged as a client default by this EIP, with the aim of fostering a sustainable and transparent gas limit trajectory, aligned with anticipated advancements in hardware and protocol efficiency, it was added by him.
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. Feist’s proposal is seen as a way to better position Ethereum to compete with Solana, which currently processes a non-vote TPS between 800 and 1,050, with a theoretical TPS of 65,000.
The current gas limit of 36 million would be expanded to 3.6 billion under the EIP, potentially allowing around 6,000 transactions to be accommodated in Ethereum blocks.
The gas limit was agreed to be raised from 30 million to 36 million by Ethereum validators in February, following Feist’s proposal.
The last change to Ethereum’s gas limit was made in August 2021 under the London hard fork, where the figure was roughly doubled from 15 million to 30 million.
It was acknowledged by Feist that a rapid increase in the gas limit under his proposal could stress less-optimized nodes and result in longer block propagation times.
It was said by him that the exponential schedule, with very gradual increments per epoch, provides ample time for node operators and developers to adapt and optimize.
EIP-9698 is seen as the Ethereum community’s latest effort to enhance scalability at the base layer, following a focus on scaling through layer 2 solutions in recent years.
It is claimed by critics of Ethereum’s layer-2 focused strategy that the ecosystem has been fragmented into several siloed chains with limited interoperability, resulting in a diminished user experience.
A fourfold increase in Ethereum’s gas limit is also being tested by Ethereum developers in the Fusaka hard fork under EIP-9678.
Fusaka has been identified as potentially going online in late 2025, while the next major Ethereum upgrade, Pectra, is set to be launched on the mainnet in May.
