Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed during an AMA session on Reddit that the Ethereum network gas cap be increased to 40 million (+33%) in order to boost performance.
The gas limit represents the maximum computing power that can be expended to process transactions or execute smart contracts in a single block. At the moment, the current limit stands at 30 million.
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Buterin has explained:
"The gas limit has not been increased for nearly three years, which is the longest time ever in the protocol's history (that 2x bump in the chart in late 2021 is ‘fake’, in that it reflects the EIP-1559 transition, which increased the ‘limit’ by 2x but only increased actual average usage by ~9%)."
For his part, Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann said that although increasing the gas limit would generate higher operational costs for validators, the benefits of the initiative outweigh the potential problems.