Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, have recently introduced a proposal that aims to cap the maximum gas a single transaction can use on the Ethereum network. The proposal, known as EIP 7983, is designed to enhance the network’s resilience against certain Denial of Service (DoS) attack vectors, improve network stability, and provide more predictability to transaction processing costs.
This proposal is a modified version of EIP 7825, which was initially introduced in November of last year but has since stalled in progress. The new proposal sets a maximum limit of 16.77 million gas for individual transactions, which is nearly half of the 30 million gas limit proposed in EIP 7825. This limit will be enforced regardless of the block gas limit set by miners or validators.
By implementing this new gas limit, transactions that exceed the 16.77 million gas limit will be invalidated during transaction validation and excluded from the transaction pool. Similarly, blocks containing transactions that surpass the set gas limit will be deemed invalid during block validation.
The chosen gas limit of 16.77 million aims to strike a balance between allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution bounds. This limit is expected to accommodate most current use cases, including contract deployments and advanced DeFi interactions, while ensuring consistent performance characteristics.
Setting a transaction gas limit is crucial for Ethereum’s network security and stability. Allowing a single transaction to consume the entire gas limit of a block can leave the network vulnerable to DoS attacks and uneven load distribution. By implementing a transaction gas limit, the risk of single-transaction DoS attacks can be reduced, gas can be allocated more fairly across transactions in a block, and block validation can become more predictable and uniform.
Overall, the introduction of a transaction gas limit is expected to enhance the network’s security, stability, and performance. It will also promote compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) by encouraging transactions with high gas limits to be broken up into smaller chunks, enabling better participation in distributed proving systems and more predictable zkVM circuit design.