EIP 7983 Proposal by Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and researcher Toni Wahrstätter have introduced a proposal to cap the maximum gas a single transaction can use. The proposal, EIP 7983, claims:

> “By implementing this limit, Ethereum can enhance its resilience against certain DoS (Denial of Service) attack vectors, improve network stability, and provide more predictability to transaction processing costs.”

The latest proposal is a modified version of EIP 7825, which was introduced in November last year but has since stagnated.

Limit on Gas Usage

The proposal aims to enforce a maximum limit of 16.77 million gas for any single transaction, nearly half of the 30 million gas limit proposed in EIP 7825. According to Buterin and Wahrstätter, this limit will apply irrespective of the block gas limit set by miners or validators.

Transactions specifying a gas limit above 16.77 million will be invalidated, meaning any transaction exceeding this limit will be rejected during validation. Similarly, any block containing such a transaction will also be deemed invalid.

Buterin and Wahrstätter believe this 16.77 million gas limit will provide a “balance between allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution bounds.” They noted:

> “This value enables most current use cases, including contract deployments and advanced DeFi interactions, while ensuring consistent performance characteristics.”

Once implemented, users and decentralized applications (dApps) will need to split high gas limit transactions into smaller operations. However, the authors expect the limit to impact only a minimal number of users and dApps, as the majority of current transactions fall well below the proposed limit.

Importance of Setting a Gas Limit

Ethereum’s current architecture permits transactions to use the entire gas limit of a block, carrying several risks. Allowing a single transaction to consume most of the gas limit can facilitate Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, where malicious actors overwhelm the network with spam transactions, making it difficult for legitimate users to access services.

The lack of a transaction gas limit can lead to uneven load distribution, negatively affecting network stability. Variable gas usage may cause imbalances in transaction processing in a block, and high-gas transactions can lead to longer block verification times, impacting user experience.

Benefits of the Proposed Gas Limit

Buterin and Wahrstätter assert that limiting gas usage for individual transactions can reduce the risks of single-transaction DoS attacks. This limit serves as a safeguard against malicious bandwidth usage due to large spam transactions.

Furthermore, it aims to ensure fair gas allocation across transactions in a block, making block validation “more predictable and uniform.” A key benefit would be improved compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs), allowing large gas limit transactions to be divided into smaller chunks. This encourages greater participation in distributed proving systems and facilitates “more predictable zkVM circuit design.”