Ethereum, Gas limit quadruple increase discussion... 'Fusaka' Hard fork to enhance scalability forecast

Main tasks of Fusaka hard fork including increase in gas limit (Source: @TimBeiko, X)

Ethereum developers are discussing a plan to increase the layer1 gas limit by about four times in the 'Fusaka' hard fork scheduled for the end of 2025. This change is expected to significantly enhance the network's scalability and processing efficiency and will be an important turning point in the core protocol direction of Ethereum.

This plan is being pursued according to the 'Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 9678' proposed by Sophia Gold, a developer on the Ethereum Foundation protocol support team, on April 23. The proposal includes an experiment to increase the gas limit to a maximum of 150 million, and this content was adopted as a major feature at the 'All Core Devs Execution Meeting (ACDE)' held on the 24th.

Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko stated, “Preliminary work is needed to align client default settings and ensure early response if issues arise,” and revealed plans to include the proposal as a formal hard fork agenda. He explained, “This approach is somewhat unusual but not entirely new.”

The gas limit refers to the amount of computation that can be processed per block on the Ethereum blockchain, which directly impacts the network's throughput and fee levels. The average gas limit has been maintained at about 30 million since August 2021 and rose to 36 million in February 2024.

Developers evaluate that increasing the gas limit can be a practical means of improving layer1 scalability without adding separate functions. However, they also emphasized the need for pre-testing to ensure that each client software can operate stably even in a high gas limit environment.

As the possibility of client errors is raised, developers are in a position to include this proposal in the Fusaka hard fork to secure enough time for bug detection and correction. The goal is to guide all clients to apply consistent settings in advance, to have a unified environment at the time of the hard fork.

The Fusaka hard fork is scheduled to be applied after the Pectra upgrade and is likely to be introduced to the Ethereum mainnet by the end of 2025. If the gas limit increase becomes a reality, it is expected that not only will the processing speed of the Ethereum network improve, but also its fee efficiency.