• Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter proposed EIP-7983 to cap individual Ethereum transaction gas at 16.77 million.
  • The cap improves security, stability, and zkVM compatibility by limiting large transactions and encouraging smaller chunks.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and researcher Toni Wahrstätter have introduced a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-7983) aimed at enhancing network stability and resilience.

The proposal suggests a protocol-level cap on transaction gas usage, setting the limit at 16.77 million gas (2²⁴) per transaction.

Aims to Prevent DoS Risks

Currently, a single transaction on Ethereum can consume an entire block's gas limit, creating a vulnerability to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and erratic network behaviour.

EIP-7983 addresses this by capping individual transactions to prevent any single operation from overwhelming the block capacity.

“By implementing this limit, Ethereum can enhance its resilience against certain DoS vectors, improve network stability, and provide more predictability to transaction processing costs,” the proposal explains.

The cap also targets greater compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs).

By restricting transaction gas, developers will be encouraged to break larger transactions into smaller, more manageable chunks, a key advantage when building scalable solutions with zkVMs.

According to the draft, any transaction exceeding the proposed limit would be rejected during block validation. This change would not alter the existing overall block gas limit, which remains adjustable by miners and validators.

Buterin and Wahrstätter selected 16.77 million gas to accommodate the majority of current use cases, including advanced DeFi operations and contract deployments, without posing additional risks.

The cap is not backwards-compatible for transactions that exceed the limit, but the authors note that most current transactions already fall within the new threshold.

The proposal builds on previous efforts such as EIP-7825, which also sought to enhance predictability in Ethereum’s execution layer.

This proposal aligns with Buterin’s recent push to simplify Ethereum’s architecture.

In May, he advocated for a leaner protocol inspired by Bitcoin’s simplicity, aiming to reduce complexity, costs, and security risks over the next five years.

Edited by Annette George