Vitalik Buterin proposes to cap gas usage per Ethereum transaction to boost zkVM compatibility, security

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, have put forth a proposal that will cap the maximum gas a single transaction can use. The proposal, EIP 7983, claims:

“By implementing this limit, Ethereum can enhance its resilience against certain DoS [Denial of Service attack] vectors, improve network stability, and provide more predictability to transaction processing costs.”

The latest proposal is a modified version of EIP 7825, which was introduced in November last year but has since stagnated.

The proposal will limit gas usage for individual transactions to 16.77 million gas

The proposal aims to enforce a maximum limit of 16.77 million gas for any single transaction, nearly half of the 30 million gas limit proposed in EIP 7825. This limit, according to Buterin and Wahrstätter, will be applicable irrespective of the block gas limit set by miners or validators.

Implementation of this proposal will see transactions specifying a gas limit above 16.77 million gas get invalidated. This means that during transaction validation, transactions exceeding the gas limit will be rejected and excluded from the transaction pool. Similarly, during block validation, any block that contains a transaction that exceeds the set gas limit will become invalid.

Buterin and Wahrstätter’s chosen 16.77 million gas limit will provide a “balance between allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution bounds,” as per the proposal. The authors added:

“This value enables most current use cases, including contract deployments and advanced DeFi interactions, while ensuring consistent performance characteristics.”

When implemented, the proposal will require users and decentralized applications (dApps) to split transactions with higher gas limits into smaller operations. However, Buterin and Wahrstätter expect the limit to impact a minimal number of users and dApps since most current transactions fall well…