On January 10, during an AMA on Reddit, Vitalik Buterin declared himself in favor of increasing the gas limit on Ethereum. In fact, this has not been increased for almost 3 years. However, this opinion does not seem to be unanimous among Ethereum developers.
Vitalik wants to increase the gas limit
Asked about transaction fees during an AMA, Vitalik Buterin said it would be reasonable to “modestly increase” the gas limit by 33%. Consequently, this would increase from 30 to 40 million units of gas.
In practice, this would increase the maximum amount of gas that could be spent by transactions in a block. As a result, this would ensure a temporary reduction in transaction fees by limiting congestion.
However, it seems that the opinion of the co-founder of Ethereum is the subject of debate among developers.
An opinion that is not unanimous
Following this AMA, the developer Marius Van Der Wijden spoke on X. Thus, this developer who works in particular on the Geth client, published a blog article returning to this potential increase in the gas limit.
In his article, Marius Van Der Wijden describes several difficulties related to increasing the gas limit.
Initially, this could lead to an increase in the number of uncommitted blocks. Indeed, as the blocks contain more transactions, they are larger. Therefore, it might be more complicated for nodes to process these larger blocks.
Secondly, this could increase network latency, due to the larger block processing time. This could also increase hardware requirements necessary for the operation of a node.
Finally, according to him, a higher gas limit would imply a significant growth in chain size. This could affect sync times and storage requirements.
However, this opinion is also controversial. According to some calculations, this increase in the gas limit would at worst lead to an increase in the block size of 1MB. A viable situation for some, but which could have negative effects for others.
Once is not customary, the community will have to continue to debate and it will be up to the validators to decide whether they wish, on a case by case basis, to increase this gas limit or not.
For its part, the price of ETH continues to rise. Thus, after passing the $2,400 mark, the token reached $2,600 on the day of January 11. According to some observers, traders are reportedly positioning themselves based on potential approval of an Ethereum ETF.