To prevent DoS attacks, promote security, and ensure zkVM compatibility, Vitalik proposes limiting the Gas for single Ethereum transactions.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and researcher Toni Wahrstätter jointly proposed a new initiative (EIP 7983) aimed at limiting the Gas usage for single Ethereum transactions. This move is seen as a key step towards enhancing zkVM compatibility and network security.
The proposal sets the maximum Gas usage for each transaction at 16.77 million, which is stricter than the previously proposed EIP 7825 (which suggested a 30 million Gas limit) that made no progress last November.
This limit will be enforced, and regardless of how the block Gas limit is set, transactions exceeding the limit will be rejected during the validation phase and removed from the transaction pool. Blocks containing such transactions will also be rendered invalid.
Buterin and Wahrstätter chose the value of 16.77 million Gas to balance the needs of complex transactions with the predictability of execution. They believe this cap is sufficient to support most existing applications, such as contract deployment and advanced DeFi interactions, while ensuring stable performance.
Although this means users and dApps will need to split large Gas transactions into multiple smaller operations, they expect limited impact since the vast majority of current transactions are well below this new threshold.
The deeper reason for proposing this limit is that the current Ethereum architecture allows a single transaction to exhaust the entire block's Gas, which provides an opportunity for malicious DoS attacks. Attackers can occupy a large amount of block space with a few junk transactions, causing network congestion and hindering normal user services.
Moreover, the lack of transaction Gas limits can lead to uneven block load distribution, affecting network stability, while fluctuations in Gas usage can prolong block validation times, harming user experience.
Setting transaction Gas limits is expected to bring multiple benefits, the most direct of which is reducing the risk of DoS attacks triggered by single transactions, providing a security barrier for the network. At the same time, it can promote fair distribution of Gas within blocks and make the block validation process more predictable and uniform.
The most significant benefit of the proposal is the substantial enhancement of compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVM). By splitting large transactions, it can better integrate into distributed proof systems for more stable zkVM circuit designs.