Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, have one proposal That pops up the maximum gas that a single transaction can use. The proposal, EIP 7983, claims:
“By implementing this limit, Ethereum can improve the resilience against certain DOS [Denial of Service attack] Vectors, improve network stability and offer more predictability for transaction processing costs. “
The newest proposal is a modified version of EIP 7825which was introduced in November last year, but has since stagnated.
The proposal will limit gas consumption for individual transactions to 16.77 million gas
The proposal is intended to enforce a maximum limit of 16.77 million gas for a single transaction, almost half of the 30 million gas limit proposed in EIP 7825. According to Buterin and Wahrstätter, this limit will apply, regardless of the limit of the block gas set by miners or validators.
The implementation of this proposal will see transactions that specify a gas limit above 16.77 million gas. This means that during transaction -validation transactions that exceed the gas limit are rejected and excluded from the transaction pool. Similarly, during block validation, every block contains a transaction that exceeds the set gas limit invalid.
The chosen 16.77 million gas limit from Buterin and Wahrstätter will “offer a balance between allowing complex transactions with achievable predictable execution unions”, according to the proposal. The authors added:
“This value makes the most current usage scenarios possible, including contract implementations and advanced Defi interactions, while they guarantee consistent performance characteristics.”
When implemented, the proposal requires users and decentralized applications (DAPPs) to split transactions with higher gas limits into smaller operations. Buterin and Wahrstätter, however, expect the limit to influence a minimum number of users and DAPPs, because most current transactions are far below the proposed limit.
Why setting a transaction gas limit matters
With the current architecture of Ethereum, transactions can theoretically use the entire gas limit of a block. This architecture brings various risks.
Allowing a single transaction can, for example, consume most or all block gas limit, it can make it easier for unpleasant to perform DOS attacks. In DOS attacks, bad actors try to overwhelm a network through a barrage of spam transactions. This ensures that the network does not provide service to real users.
According to the proposal, the absence of a transaction gas limit can also lead to uneven charging distribution and influence on network stability.
Having variable gas consumption can also cause an imbalance in the tax distribution between transactions in a block. In addition, transactions with high gas also cause longer block vers, which can influence the user experience.
Advantages of setting a transaction gas limit
According to Buterin and Wahrstätter, limiting the limit of gas use of individual transactions can help reduce the risk of DOS attacks with one transaction. In essence, the limit will set a crash barrier that prevents malignant actors from using the bandwidth of the network through large spam transactions.
The limit would also ensure that gas is fairly assigned to transactions in a block, according to the proposal. The cap is also expected to make the validation of blocks “more predictable and more uniform”.
However, the most important advantage would be improved compatibility with virtual machines with zero knowledge (ZKVMs). Encourage transactions with hefty gas limits to be split into smaller chunks “ensures better participation in distributed evidence systems”, and makes “more predictable ZKVM circuit design possible,” said the proposal.
