This is an observation and personal opinion from Nothing Research Partner 0x_Todd. The following content does not constitute any investment advice.
Many people still have the impression that ETH's TPS (transactions per second) is 15, but in fact, ETH's peak TPS has now increased by 4x to 60 transactions per second.
Although it is related to years of continuous optimization, the most direct reason can be attributed to the simple and straightforward increase of the GAS Limit from the previous cap of 15 million to 36 million.
Recently, ETH is about to raise the GAS Limit to a cap of 60 million again.
What is the GAS Limit? Each of us needs to pay GAS when using ETH. The GAS Limit, as the name suggests, is the upper limit of GAS that an ETH block can accept. With more transactions processed, the speed naturally increases.
Looking at various scaling ideas, increasing the GAS Limit is the most immediate way to scale.
Moreover, this increase in the fuel fee limit does not require a hard fork because it is a dynamic parameter that PoS nodes can adjust within the existing rules of the protocol.
In other words, allowing each new block producer to adjust this matter in a small range (±1/1024) compared to the parent block is part of the consensus rules. This is different from Bitcoin fixing the block size at 1MB.
Therefore, increasing the GAS Limit can be done as long as the PoS nodes vote (currently there are over 1 million nodes in the network). There is a 'signaling' process, and once a threshold is reached, the network adopts the change, thus maintaining compatibility for all nodes.
Currently, 15% of validators support the 60 million GAS, and because this upgrade is voluntary, you can see that many validators are still stuck on the previous two versions, which are 30 million.
Increasing the GAS Limit does not mean that PoS nodes can earn more money; they are likely to earn less.
After EIP-1559, the base fee of Ethereum is directly burned, and nodes can only earn tips. Therefore, increasing the GAS Limit means that ETH burns more, and tips are likely to decrease because the network becomes less 'competitive'.
Hence, the nodes willing to support 60M are quite selfless.
Lastly, as an aside, there has been a recent EIP-9698 proposal in the Ethereum community, which demands to increase the fuel fee limit directly by 100 times (from 36 million to 3.6 billion) within four years, aiming for 2000 transactions per second, targeting Solana...
This is indeed a bit exaggerated; increasing the GAS Limit under the premise that PoS nodes' performance is unlimited can indeed be increased infinitely.
However, you know I'm going to say 'but', obviously the servers and physical host performance of PoS nodes are not infinite, especially since ETH has to cater to over 1 million validators, which is a difference of 10,000 times compared to some public chains with only over 100 validators.
Moreover, even if this time the limit is raised to 60M, which is nearly a double increase, it still benefited from the Pectra upgrade to have the opportunity to enter the voting process.
According to research from ethpandaops, raising the GAS limit to 60M will allow 90% of blocks to be discovered for the first time within 1016 milliseconds, which slightly increases the block propagation time compared to the past, but remains within an acceptable range.
However, considering that 66% of the nodes in the network need to see the block and its related blob within 4 seconds for it to be considered valid, the theoretical value measured on the testnet indicates that this GAS Limit can only reach a maximum of 150 million.
Therefore, in the short term, EIP-9698 is indeed impossible.
Of course, if Ethereum really implements a 'large and small node' system in the future, meaning 2048 ETH as a large node and 32 ETH as a small node, there is a chance to continue increasing the GAS Limit.
So, although I always say that the ETH GAS Price has fallen to a historic low, and the aristocratic chain is no more, there may be an objective fact that Ethereum itself is indeed becoming faster and cheaper.