Vitalik Buterin Proposes Transaction Gas Limit on Ethereum to Boost Security and Network Performance
Ethereum is moving toward a major change to increase stability and resilience to cyberattacks, through the EIP-7983 proposal initiated by co-founder Vitalik Buterin and researcher Toni Wahrstätter.
According to the proposal, published on July 6, Ethereum could impose a 16.77 million unit gas limit for each single transaction, to prevent a single transaction from taking up the entire gas limit of an entire block – a situation that has left the network vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
-New limit would increase predictability and reduce operational risk
Currently, Ethereum transactions do not have individual gas limits, meaning that a single heavy transaction could take up an entire block, slowing down the system and affecting stability. EIP-7983 addresses this by imposing a 16.77 million gas cap per transaction, which encourages the splitting of complex operations and a more equitable distribution of network resources.
Transactions that exceed this limit will be rejected early in the validation process, helping the network avoid attacks that clog the system. More importantly, the block-wide gas limit remains the same, adjusted by miners and validators, ensuring flexibility and not impacting the current consensus mechanism.
-Friendly to zkVMs and complex DeFi applications
Vitalik and Toni note that the 16.77 million gas threshold is “a reasonable balance point,” just enough to support complex operations like smart contract deployments or DeFi transactions, but still ensuring the ability to split and verify easily, which is extremely important for zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs).
Splitting transactions also improves the efficiency of proof generation, especially in increasingly popular zero-knowledge protocols.
-No impact on regular users
Most current transactions have significantly lower gas consumption than the proposed limit, so this change will not disrupt regular users or developers. Instead, it aims to eliminate “oversized” transactions, which can be harmful to the entire network.
This proposal is also considered an extension of the previous EIP-7825, which aims to improve the consistency and predictability of the Ethereum network.
-Ethereum faces competitive pressure from Solana
While Ethereum is improving its core architecture to become more stable and accessible, platforms like Solana are making huge strides in speed and application revenue. In June, Solana surpassed Ethereum in total dApp revenue, generating over $146 million, and dominated the DEX market with $5.78 billion in volume, compared to Ethereum’s $4.7 billion.
Against this backdrop, Vitalik Buterin also emphasized the need to simplify Ethereum’s design, including a partial stateless proposal to reduce the hardware burden on network nodes.
-The Future of Ethereum: Safer, Simpler, More Efficient
If implemented, EIP-7983 could become part of Ethereum’s long-term strategy: optimizing performance, increasing security, and reducing operational complexity, which is especially important in the race against next-generation high-performance blockchains.
The proposal is currently being discussed within the Ethereum community, and could be tested on testnets in the near future.
