Ethereum community debates raising gas limits amid stability and security concerns

Although raising gas limit for Ethereum blocks enhances the protocol's performance, it also poses security risks that have to be carefully observed.

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Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, has called for patience in addressing Ethereum’s block gas limit expansion, citing technical challenges in a Dec. 9 post.

The discussion comes as the Ethereum community debates raising the gas limit, a change that could enhance network capacity but also pose risks to stability and security.

Wahrstätter highlighted constraints tied to consensus layer (CL) client specifications, which make surpassing the current 36 million gas threshold infeasible without significant protocol upgrades.

Beyond the 36 million threshold

Ethereum’s CL specifications enforce a 10 mebibytes (MiB) maximum uncompressed block size for efficient gossip propagation across the network. This restriction is vital to maintaining block propagation without introducing delays or instability.

A proposed increase to 60 million gas per block would breach this limit, leading to propagation failures, missed validator slots, and potential network destabilization.

These limitations, while restrictive, are designed to mitigate risks such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, as larger blocks could overwhelm network nodes and expose vulnerabilities without offering immediate benefits.

Blocks up to 36 million gas remain within acceptable gossip size limits, ensuring seamless propagation and consensus stability. However, exceeding this threshold risks creating valid blocks that fail to propagate, disrupting validators and reducing network efficiency.

The lack of empirical data on network performance under higher gas limits further complicates the situation. Core developers emphasize the need for a cautious approach to avoid undermining Ethereum’s security and reliability.

Parithosh Jayanthi, a member of the Ethereum Foundation’s ethPandaOps unit, echoed the sentiment, urging developers to prioritize testing and data collection to evaluate the trade-offs of higher gas limits.

Pectra offers path to higher gas limits

Ethereum developers are preparing the Pectra 2 network upgrade to address these challenges. This hard fork includes two critical proposals designed to lay the groundwork for higher gas limits.

The first is the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 7623 (EIP-7623), which reduces worst-case block sizes by mitigating DoS risks and enabling safer capacity increases. 

The second is the EIP-7691, which increases the target and maximum number of blobs per block, providing empirical data on network performance under higher storage and propagation demands. Blobs are block spaces dedicated to receiving data from layer-2 blockchains.

By implementing these changes, Pectra 2 will provide crucial insights into the network’s ability to handle larger blocks while maintaining stability.