Ethereum Miners Are Increasing the Network’s Gas Limit by 25%
Ethereum miners are in the process of increasing the network’s gas limit from 10,000,000 to 12,500,000 in response to increasing network usage tied to the growth of decentralized finance products.
On Ethereum, users pay gas fees to include transactions in blocks, and the network’s block size is bounded by the amount of gas that can be spent, which is now increasing to 12,500,000. While with Bitcoin there is a fixed block size, Ethereum gas limits vary according to the limits miners signal to the network, which they do by publishing the maximum gas they accepted in the most recent block.
Per block, miners can adjust the gas limit up or down by about 0.1%. Etherscan data shows the limit is slowly trending toward 12,000,000 at press time. According to Bitfly, the firm behind the ETH mining pool Ethermine, the gas limit increase will allow Ethereum to handle about 44 transactions per second instead of 35, but it will also increase the recourses needed to run the network.
Ethereum’s miners have increased the gas limit significantly in September 2019 as well, when they moved it from 8,000,000 to 10,000,000.
