Ethereum mainnet processing capacity will triple following an agreement to establish a two hundred million (200M) gas limit floor.
This historic agreement was reinforced at the recent event “Soldøgn Interop” held in Svalbard, which brought together over 100 core developers. Defining the technical foundation of Gramsterdamthe next big update for the network.
To understand the magnitude of this announcement, you have to imagine the gas limit as the bandwidth or capacity of an Ethereum block. The network is currently operating at a limit of 60M. Increasing this “floor” to 200M practically means: Triple the execution power of your base layer.
This is not just an increase in numbers; Performance guaranteed. By establishing a “floor,” developers can ensure that there is always a significant minimum amount of space on the network, allowing them to process thousands of transactions or more every 12 seconds without congesting the infrastructure.
Developers were most concerned about the sustainability of increasing gas limits. After debating whether a fixed cost per byte was sufficient to protect small validators from centralization, we concluded on a technical compromise that prioritized efficiency for slow clients before deployment.
Implementation pillars: ePBS, BAL, EIP-8037
For Ethereum to be able to support this weight without fragmenting, its “financial plumbing” will need to be radically redesigned. This implementation is based on three technical advances that the developer team has refined.
The first one is ePBS (Separation of proposers and builders). This system formally separates those who propose blocks and those who build them. fart It reduces the heavy construction burden on individual validators.the network can handle 200M blocks without the risk of home nodes being rendered out of service due to lack of power.
The second pillar of the network supporting these 200M is BAL (Block-level access list). This is the key to parallel execution. Traditionally, Ethereum processes transactions sequentially, one after the other. BAL allows nodes to determine which parts of their state are affected and process multiple transactions simultaneously, doubling efficiency.
Last but not least is EIP-8037. To prevent this increased capacity from filling validators’ hard drives prematurely, this proposal adjusts data creation costs to ensure database growth is sustainable over time.
Impact on the ecosystem and its users
For regular users, the arrival of Gramsterdam, with the announced increase in gas limits, will provide a smoother and more economical experience. A higher gas limit should reduce competition in the fee auction, resulting in lower and more stable trading fees even during times of high volatility.
On top of that, This advancement is essential for Layer 2 (L2) networks such as Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base.. With more space on the main layer, these networks will be able to transfer data more cheaply, which will ultimately benefit users.
Although the technical agreement is now a reality, the team is currently focused on “shielding” the code within the test network (fatnet) before official deployment. The success of this increase in processing power will determine Ethereum’s competitiveness against high-performance networks such as Solana and its ability to absorb data flows in second-tier networks.
