Miners on Ethereum are currently in the process of increasing the network’s gas limit from 10,000,000 to 12,500,000 in response to increased network utilization.
Users pay gas fees to include transactions in an Ethereum block. The network’s block size is bounded by the amount of gas that can be spent per block, which was previously 10,000,000 units. Unlike Bitcoin, which has a fixed block size, Ethereum’s block size varies depending on the gas limits miners signal to the network, which they do by publishing the maximum gas limit they accepted in the most recent block. The Ethereum protocol allows miners to adjust the gas limit, up or down, by roughly 0.1% in each new block.
According to Etherscan, this gas limit now hovers around 12,000,000.
With the gas limit increase, Ethereum would have the capability to handle approximately 44 transactions per second instead of 35, according to Bitfly, the parent company of Ethereum mining pool Ethermine. A gas limit increase, however, also increases the resources needed to run and maintain nodes for validating transactions on the network.
Source: Etherscan
The last significant gas limit increase by miners occurred in September 2019, increasing the limit it from 8 to 10 million.
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