tl;dr
The Ethereum community is in a debate about raising gas limits, with concerns about stability and security. A researcher at the Ethereum Foundation has emphasized technical challenges and the potential risks of surpassing the current gas threshold. The discussion revolves around the impact on networ...
The Ethereum community is currently engaged in a debate over the potential raising of gas limits, citing concerns about stability and security. Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, has highlighted the technical challenges involved in this expansion and emphasized the risks associated with surpassing the current gas threshold. The discussion revolves around the impact on network capacity, stability, and security, with proposed increases potentially leading to network destabilization and other issues.
Wahrstätter has emphasized the constraints tied to consensus layer (CL) client specifications, making it infeasible to surpass the current 36 million gas threshold without significant protocol upgrades. Ethereum developers are preparing the Pectra 2 network upgrade to address these challenges. This hard fork includes critical proposals designed to lay the groundwork for higher gas limits, with the aim of providing crucial insights into the network’s ability to handle larger blocks while maintaining stability.
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.
Furthermore, 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.
Ethereum developers are aiming to tackle these challenges through the Pectra 2 network upgrade, which includes proposals to reduce worst-case block sizes, mitigate DoS risks, and enable safer capacity increases. The upgrade also involves increasing the target and maximum number of blobs per block, providing empirical data on network performance under higher storage and propagation demands.