Summary:
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin finds some suggestion of expanding Layer1 gas limit 10 to 100 times. Succinct Labs proves the real-time generation of proofs on zkVMs which is a main breakthrough in Ethereum scaling. The main pitfalls are left: energy consumption, formal verification, worst-case reliability and gas cost. The gas limit of Ethereum is currently ~36 million units, the proposed limit would be as high as 3.6 billion units. There are still changes in the gas limit through increments but without hard fork, which is caused by introduced innovations such as zk-rollups and Layer 2 solutions.
The Importance of Ethereum Gas Limit
The gas limit framework in Ethereum determines the number of computations that can be present in a block and it has a direct effect on the number of transactions or smart contracts that can be supported concurrently. Currently, the gas limit is 36 million units on average marking a 20 percent increase comparing to the last year.
This would increase to between 360 million to 3.6 billion units with a substantial increase of gas limit, as proposed by Vitalik Buterin, increasing Ethereum capacity significantly and creating a space of more scalable distributed applications.
Vitalik Buterin on Real-Time Proving and the Scalability of the Network
Because of the latest achievement of Succinct Labs, live real-time proof generation on Ethereum with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs), Vitalik also congratulated the team and warned about some critical problems to be achieved. He emphasized:
“The system has not been tested outside of average cases. It must be production-ready that it is provably reliable even in worst-case situations.”
In addition, Buterin also notes that the real-time proving systems, in their current form, have energy requirements too high to be able to utilize them in practice:
“The system is using approximately 100 kilowatts of power which should be trimmed to 10 kW or less.”
Besides, he pointed at the lack of formal verification that is required to guarantee a bug-free functioning and the need of increasing the gas limit in order to accommodate these heavy-weight proof systems.
Technical and Network Consequences
Earlier this year Ethereum increased the gas limit by 2 million gas units, introducing the change past the 30 million gas units threshold to over 50 percent validators, implementing it non-forkingly. Such a stepwise strategy may persist even in the future when the network adopts such advanced solutions as zk-rollups and scaling to Layer 2.
Coupled with drastically increasing the gas limit, Ethereum will be able to:
- Verify more transactions and complicated smart contracts in blocks.
- Sustain complex zero-knowledge proofs essential in privacy and scalability.
- Support real-time proving systems that are efficient in energy and secure.
Looking Ahead
The vision of Vitalik Buterin is the first dramatic step to scale an execution layer of ethereum. Nevertheless, the network will be forced to accept the changes, though it is important to solve the issues associated with energy efficiency, formal verification, and worst-case reliability.
In case it succeeds, such an expansion of a gas limit by Ethereum will transform blockchain scalability in an unprecedented way providing users all over the world with faster, cheaper and more powerful decentralized applications.