A new Ethereum proposal, co-authored by Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstaetter. aims to impose a hard cap on the maximum gas a transaction can consume in a move developers say could strengthen network stability and make the chain more viable for certain applications.
The proposal, EIP-7983, suggests limiting individual transactions to 16,777,216 gas (2²⁴) — a sharp change from the current design which technically allows a single transaction to consume the entire block gas limit.
As of Monday, a single Ethereum transaction can consume as much gas as an entire block allows — a design choice that introduces several performance and security challenges.
When a single transaction consumes nearly all the available gas, it disrupts the distribution of workloads across the network and tends to make block execution less efficient.
Developers working on zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVM) have found it difficult to process large transactions in parallel, often defaulting to splitting work across multiple transactions instead.
And for parallel execution engines, wildly varying gas sizes introduce imbalance across processing threads
Proponents say that the cap would simplify these pain points.
“16,777,216 is nice because it makes it easier to subdivide things, potentially simplifying downstream engineering,” one contributor wrote in the GitHub thread. Others argued it aligned with Ethereum’s longer-term shift toward modularity and provability.
The new ceiling would require splitting some large transactions, such as contract deployments, into smaller chunks. Authors of the proposal stated that most real-world activities already fall well below the limit, and edge cases are minimal.
EIP-7983 builds on earlier resource-bounding initiatives, such as EIP-7825, and signals a growing consensus that Ethereum’s base layer should enforce tighter execution guarantees as it scales.
The proposal remains in draft status and is now open for broader community review.
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