The percentage of Ethereum validators signaling support for raising the network’s gas limit rose to 10% as the community rallied to increase the maximum amount of gas allowed to be spent for transactions to be included in a single Ethereum block.
On Dec. 19, the number of validators signaling a gas limit greater than 30 million increased to 10% of the network. Before December, the percentage of validators signaling an increase in gas limit was a little over 1%.
The increase follows efforts by Ethereum community members to advocate for raising the gas limit to 36 million.
Increasing the gas limits could result in lower transaction fees
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Awosika, creative director at 2077 Collective, highlighted the benefits for developers, noting that the current gas limit can hinder the deployment of high-demand applications. Awosika told Cointelegraph that raising the gas limits is a way for the network to show that it’s giving ambitious devs something to work with.
Awosika said that specific applications cannot be deployed with its current gas limit because gas prices will spike once the applications go viral, leading to a “very degraded user experience.”
Risk of increasing gas limits too much
“If the gas limit is raised too high we could create a scenario where the chain becomes too large for solo node operators to validate and download. Technology improves however and it does make sense to slowly increase it as time goes on.”
It said that raising the gas limits too fast could lead to “unexpected externalities” beyond storage and bandwidth.