More than 150,000 Ethereum validators, which is about 15% of the total number of validators in the network, supported the increase of the gas limit from the current figure of 36 million to 60 million units.
In Ethereum, gas serves as the basic unit of measurement for the computational effort required to execute transactions or smart contracts. The gas limit represents the maximum amount of gas that all transactions can consume within a single block.
Increasing the maximum limit will allow each block to process more data, and the network will be able to handle a larger volume of transactions. Unlike core protocol upgrades, this change does not require a hard fork. Validators can modify the configurations of their nodes when proposing blocks. Once more than 50% of validators confirm their support, the gas limit in the block will change automatically.
Previously, the gas limit was 30 million, but it was increased to 36 million in February of this year. The last adjustment was made in 2021 when this figure was doubled from 15 to 30 million units.
Although the increased gas limit may boost transaction throughput, some developers warn that this could put a strain on node operators' equipment and potentially impact the network's performance.