Ethereum’s Eyes Covered under Vitalik Buterin’s New Recommendation

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter proposed an upper limit on how much gas can be used in a single transaction and aims to improve safety while retaining efficiency as the protocol matures.

Draft proposal EIP-7983 limits gas per transaction to 16.77 million. Interestingly, this is a significant change compared to the current architecture where a single transaction can consume gas allowances for the entire block.

Developers believe that this open design exposes Ethereum to denial of service (DOS) risks, inconsistent network loads and slower block verification, especially when chains support increasingly complex defi and zero-knowledge applications.

EIP-7983

By introducing hard caps, Buterin and Wahrstätter seek to enforce more predictable resource usage without significantly undermining typical user activity, noting that most transactions are currently well below the recommended threshold.

During the verification period, more than 16.77 million weather cover transactions will be rejected. Such a move will ensure that super-large transactions cannot enter the block, and under existing consensus rules, the validator itself will maintain the block gas limit itself.

The authors place this move as part of a broader effort to simplify the underlying layer of Ethereum and improve network reliability essentially resonates Buterin’s recent call for simplified protocol design inspired by Bitcoin’s minimalist spirit.

Relax ZKVM constraints

Developers working in ZKVM and parallel execution engines highlighted the difficulty of handling transactions with unpredictable gas sizes. They believe that fixed ceilings can reduce engineering constraints and can better carry out workloads across threads.

This upper limit is also expected to reduce the risk of any single transaction monopoly block resources, thereby increasing execution time and preventing propagation consistency. While the proposed limitations may require some large deployments to split transactions into smaller segments, it fits in with Ethereum’s long-term goal of supporting modular and proven systems while maintaining the user experience.

EIP-7983 is built on the now stationary EIP-7825, but has a lower ceiling. The proposal is currently in draft status and is now open for community discussions as developers evaluate their actual impact on the network.