Vitalik Buterin Proposes EIP-7983 to Cap Transaction Gas Use

To improve network speed and security, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, and Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher, have proposed EIP-7983, which seeks to implement a limit on transaction gas use at the protocol level.

An individual transaction’s gas limit is set at 16.77 million (2²⁴) under the proposal. Moreover, the proposal states that by imposing this restriction, Ethereum may make the network more stable. Also, boost its resistance against certain types of denial-of-service attacks, and make transaction processing costs more predictable.

Restricting Gas Usage

A single transaction might hypothetically use up all of the gas in an Ethereum block under the present architecture. Which may cause the network to behave in an unexpected way and put users at risk of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. To prevent a small number of transactions from exhausting the block capacity, EIP-7983 aims to restrict the total amount of gas use.

Additionally, the proposed limit encourages the splitting of big transactions into smaller parts. Which will enhance compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs).

The draft states that during block validation, transactions with gas limitations over 16.77 million will be denied. This would prevent such transactions from entering the network or being included in future blocks. The limitation has nothing to do with the total gas limit for blocks, which validators and miners may still change according to the current consensus rules.

To strike a compromise between complexity and performance, Buterin and Wahrstätter settled on 16.77 million. They made the point that this number can handle sophisticated DeFi use cases and contract deployments as they are without adding needless risks.

Although the proposal does not support transactions that surpass the proposed limit, the authors did point out that the majority of current transactions are below this restriction, so users and developers need not be too concerned. In an attempt to make transaction execution more predictable, EIP-7983 expands on earlier work, such as EIP-7825.

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