What To Know:
- Vitalik Buterin signaled that Ethereum may move toward a fivefold increase in the block gas limit paired with higher gas costs for operations that place heavy load on clients.
- New EIPs propose raising fees for storage reads, complex arithmetic, large contract calls, and selected precompiles after recent DoS attacks exposed underpriced state-access opcodes.
- The approach aims to expand throughput while reducing resource-intensive spam risks, supported by complementary updates like EIP 90 and EIP 114.
Ethereum is preparing for a period of targeted scaling, and the next phase could be one of the most consequential shifts to the network’s resource model since the Merge. Vitalik Buterin signaled this direction in a new post, stating that the network should anticipate a significant expansion in its block gas limit paired with higher gas costs for operations that strain client performance.
Vitalik Buterin Discusses Ethereum Improvement Proposals on Gas
The remarks arrive at a time when Ethereum has already doubled its block gas limit. The network is now running at 60 million gas per block, one year after the community began advocating for higher limits. The change required coordinated work across client teams and researchers, many of whom have been studying execution-layer bottlenecks, spam vectors, and the uneven gas pricing inherited from early versions of the protocol.
Expect continued growth but more targeted / less uniform growth for next year.
eg. one possible future is: 5x gas limit increase together with 5x gas cost increase for operations that are relatively inefficient to process
Potential targets for such increases (my current view):… https://t.co/FkiTxJnEAq
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 26, 2025
Buterin said developers could expect continued growth but with more precision in how that growth is applied. One projection under consideration is a fivefold increase in the block gas limit combined with a fivefold increase in the gas cost of operations that impose disproportionate load on clients. The method aims to expand throughput while moderating the impact of expensive actions that read or manipulate state.
He listed several candidates for higher gas costs. Storage writes, especially when contracts create new storage slots. Calls to contracts with large code size. Precompile usage, excluding elliptic curve operations. Complex arithmetic opcodes, such as modular multiplication. And calldata, which may see a smaller adjustment. These categories share a common characteristic: they place more pressure on node resources than their current pricing reflects.
Recent network incidents strengthened the case for recalibrating gas costs. A series of denial-of-service attacks showed that opcodes reading from Ethereum’s state tree remain underpriced relative to their computational burden. Reading from disk is slow. When attackers submit transactions that repeatedly trigger these operations, block processing times rise sharply. This bottleneck also affects future sharding designs, since the most effective attack transactions require large Merkle proofs.
A new EIP focused on this issue increases the cost of storage-read opcodes. The pricing is derived from an updated version of the original gas-cost calculation tables and attempts to set a ceiling of roughly eight megabytes of state data read per block. The proposal includes estimates of 500 bytes for an SLOAD Merkle proof and 1,000 bytes for an account proof. A flat penalty of 300 gas is also added to account for code-loading overhead, which can reach 21 kilobytes in large contracts.
Additional EIPs complement the adjustment. EIP 90 preserves compatibility for existing contracts that calculate call gas using msg.gas minus 40. Without this safeguard, legacy contracts would fail. EIP 114 supplements the updated call-cost model by replacing the fixed call-stack depth limit with a softer, gas-based restriction. Developers gain protection from call-stack attacks, while the effective maximum depth drops from about 1,024 to roughly 340 frames. This reduction helps contain any future complexity-based denial-of-service attempts involving nested calls.
The larger discussion centers on throughput. Any increase in gas costs for expensive operations must be paired with a higher block gas limit to maintain the network’s current transaction capacity. The proposed scaling pattern aligns with that principle. By raising the limit, the network expands headroom. By raising the costs of specific operations, the network reduces pathways for resource exhaustion.
Ethereum’s roadmap has long prioritized steady, safety-focused scaling. In market trading, Ethereum is up 1.8% over the past 24 hours at $2,928.12.
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