Ethereum Miners Start Increasing Gas Limit Capacity

Ethereum miners have began increasing network capacity to 13 million gas at the time of writing, up from the nearly year long limit of 12.5 million.

Bitfly, the parent company of one of the biggest mining pool, Ethermine, announced earlier today:

“Following the efficiency improvements from the Berlin hard fork we believe it is save to increase the Ethereum gas limit from 12,500,000 to 15,000,000.”

As pictured above, the current gas limit is 13 million according to Etherstats, suggesting miners have already began voting for an increase.

Only 51% of miners are required to vote for a higher limit for it to change, with this so being a planned 17% increase of total capacity.

That follows the suggestion by ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin to increase block capacity to 15-20 million gas units as the Berlin upgrade that successfully completed earlier this month changes a number of gas cost calculations that makes the network safer from DDoS attacks.

After that upgrade went through, users were complaining about a significant increase in fees with about 14,000 eth, worth $30 million, paid to miners in fees everyday.

This small increase in capacity might alleviate that pressure slightly, but it is unlikely to change the dynamics too much especially considering that some gas calculations have been increased by 3x.

A bigger change may come this summer when EIP1559 goes through. That brings in a new algorithm targeting a base fee to be set at a sufficient level for the network to have 50% capacity.

This is a very new thing in the entire crypto space, so what it will really mean in practice is to be seen.

The hope however is that it removes the miners’ incentive for fees to be artificially inflated or to outright spam the network because much of the fee will be burned.

With that being potentially just two months away, this capacity increase might give the network some breathing room as it can now accommodate more transactions.

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