Vitalik Buterin Plans to Increase Ethereum's Gas Limit by 10–100x to Support Advanced Scalability

Succinct Labs' zkVM demo impressed Buterin but still needs improvements in energy use and verification. Real-time proving tech could revolutionize Layer 1 performance

In a recent series of posts on X, Vitalik Buterin highlighted a major milestone reached by Succinct Labs, and also casually dropped a bit of a bombshell: the Ethereum core team is planning to increase the chain’s gas limit by 10-100x.

Now, why is this a big deal? Well, to put it simply, a higher gas limit has some interesting implications for the balance of power within Ethereum. It could also put paid to a key criticism leveled at the chain.

But first, let’s take a look at what Succinct Labs is working on.

Completing the journey of efficient real-time proofs

Earlier this week, Buterin had nothing but praise for Uma Roy and her team at Succinct Labs as they completed the journey of efficient real-time proofs.

“People often ask me what part of the blockchain space I’m most impressed by right now. My answer: the rapid improvement of STARKs/zk-rollups and the complete lack of people complaining about zk-rollups anymore,” Buterin said.

He was referring to Succinct Labs’ SP1 Hypercube, a zkVM that can rapidly generate verifiable proofs of state for a large portion of Ethereum. In a post on Thursday, Buterin shared a video of the Hypercube in action, and noted that it can already efficiently prove 90% of Ethereum blocks in 12 seconds.

“The system is able to achieve this level of performance with a 64-core CPU and 10 kW of power usage, which is about the same power consumption as a small house or a large office,” Buterin said.

He added that the system is able to rapidly generate proofs even in the presence of 6% Byzantine attackers, and that the system can be easily scaled up to handle more chains and a higher throughput.

“This is truly amazing. My only complaint is that I wish the system could be made even more power efficient, ideally reaching the 1-3 kW range, which would allow home users and smaller teams to run real-time proof systems.”

A 10-100x gas limit increase is coming to Ethereum

In another post on Friday, Buterin disclosed that the Ethereum core devs are planning to increase the chain’s gas limit by 10-100x.

This move is being made to turbocharge the growth of optimistic and zk-rollups, as it would lower the economic and technical barriers for validators to participate in securing multiple chains.

A higher gas limit would also decrease the relative weight of minimal processing overhead in setting the gas limit, and thereby reduce the potential for censorship. Finally, it would create the gas space necessary to deploy more advanced cryptographic mechanisms on-chain, such as zk-based proofs.

“We are still working on the technical details of how to best implement this change, but I believe that it is a necessary step to ensure that Ethereum can continue to innovate and scale in the years to come,” Buterin said.

The gas limit is a critical parameter that determines the amount of computational work that can be performed within a single Ethereum block. Currently, the gas limit is set relatively low, which imposes limitations on the complexity and expressiveness of smart contracts that can be deployed on the chain.

This has led to a situation where most advanced cryptographic and computational techniques are being deployed on Layer 2s, while Layer 1 is largely limited to simple token transfers and other low-level operations.

A higher gas limit would allow for a richer and more varied computational landscape on Layer 1, Buterin said.

“We could finally have sufficiently advanced cryptographic operations on-chain to enable advanced use cases such as atomic cross-chain swaps and programmable tokens in a way that is both efficient and secure.”

He added that this would also open up new possibilities for hybrid optimistic-zk-rollups, which combine the advantages of both paradigms.

“We could also see the emergence of new and unexpected use cases that we haven’t even thought of yet.”