Ethereum mainnet could soon handle up to 2,000 transactions per second if a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) from Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist moves forward, potentially boosting the network’s gas limit by 100 times.
Feist, who inspired the name for the blockchain’s “danksharding” data storage system, proposed a new upgrade called EIP-9698 on Apr. 27. If approved, it would set a fixed schedule for gradually increasing the gas limit, starting around June. 1 at epoch 369017.
EIP-9698 suggests slowly increasing the gas limit by a factor of 10 over about two years, or 164,250 epochs. After that, there will be one final tenfold increase. Ethereum clients will need to vote in favor of it. Feist said.
By introducing a predictable exponential growth pattern as a client default, this EIP encourages a sustainable and transparent gas limit trajectory, aligned with expected advancements in hardware and protocol efficiency.
EIP-9678 aims to increase Ethereum’s gas limit by 100x
Since Ethereum can sometimes process up to 20 transactions per second (TPS) in blocks that mostly consist of simple transactions, a 100x increase in the gas limit could theoretically boost its TPS to 2,000. Feist’s proposal would help Ethereum better compete with platforms like Solana, which currently handles between 800 and 1,050 transactions per second (TPS) and has a theoretical 65,000 TPS.
The EIP proposes increasing the current gas limit from 36 million to 3.6 billion, allowing around 6,000 transactions to fit into Ethereum blocks. The proposal comes after Ethereum validators agreed to increase the gas limit from 30 million to 36 million earlier this year in February. The last update to Ethereum’s gas limit happened in Aug. 2021 with the London hard fork.
During this update, the gas limit was nearly doubled, increasing from 15 million to 30 million. Feist recognized that quickly raising the gas limit in his proposal could put pressure on less-optimized nodes and slow down block propagation times.
Meanwhile, Ethereum developers are also planning to test a fourfold increase in the gas limit during the Fusaka hard fork under EIP-9678.
