Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, recently underlined the importance of increasing the Ethereum network’s gas limit, beyond the recent hike from 30 million to 36 million. He argued that a higher layer-1 (L1) capacity is crucial for maintaining censorship resistance, reducing inter-layer costs, and providing a buffer for unexpected failures.
In a recent blog post, Buterin emphasized the necessity of accommodating more transactions per block by raising the gas limit, despite the trade-off of accelerated state growth which could make maintaining a full node more challenging. There is a risk that high resource demands could centralize nodes, thus potentially undermining Ethereum’s decentralization.
Buterin also addressed the role of L1 as a safeguard should any layer-2 (L2) solutions encounter issues. He warned that the current capacity might be insufficient to handle mass withdrawals if a major L2 faces a failure, potentially requiring Ethereum to increase its capacity nearly ninefold without optimizations for efficient large-scale exits. Additionally, the existing capacity limits could increase the cost of transferring low-volume assets and NFTs, where interoperability between L2s is necessary but presently costly.
Moreover, Buterin expressed concerns over the security of ERC-20 token issuance on L2s, suggesting that L1 issuance could mitigate the risks associated with hostile governance changes in L2s, which might otherwise lead to excessive token minting with broader ecosystem impacts.
Ethereum’s future upgrades, including the upcoming Pectra upgrade scheduled for April 8, are expected to address these issues. Pectra will feature an increase in the target number of “blobs” per block, enhancing scalability by improving data availability for L2s, alongside a staker-voted mechanism for these changes. This strategic shift is expected to mitigate network congestion and high gas fees while potentially bolstering fee revenues, which recently saw a dip below $1 million since September.
