On July 21, CoinWorld reported that nearly half of the staked Ethereum validators support the 'increase gas limit' initiative. As a result, the gas limit for each Ethereum block has begun to rise, which will enhance the transaction throughput of the Layer 1 blockchain. On Sunday afternoon, several blocks proposed to set the gas limit to over 39 million units, an 8% increase from the previous 36 million, marking the first time in three years that this limit has been raised from 30 million. Proponents of the 'increase gas limit' initiative believe that raising the limit too much could make the chain too large and increase the difficulty for individual node operators to validate and download, but they argue that a gradual increase is reasonable with technological advancements. Once validators express a desire to raise the block limit, it will automatically increase, allowing each block to adjust the limit to about 0.1% of the total from the previous block. According to gaslimit.pics, about 48% of the clients running staked Ethereum have set a gas limit target of 45 million units or higher.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin mentioned this initiative in a post on X, stating: 'Nearly 50% of the staking share voted to raise the Layer 1 gas limit to 45 million.' He also praised the recent update of Geth, which reduces the storage capacity of archive nodes by about 90%, calling it 'the hard work of the Geth team recently, making such scaling enhancements safe and feasible.'