Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano said the goal to significantly increase Ethereum’s gas limit to 180 million next year is a baseline rather than a best-case scenario.
“I think that’s the floor, that’s the minimum, I think we can go higher than that,” Sassano said during an interview on the Bankless podcast on Friday, just a day after Ethereum’s gas limit, which is the maximum amount of work the network allows in each block, was raised from 45 million to 60 million.
“The general consensus that has been set by the core developers and researchers is that they want to aim for at least a 3X increase in the gas limit for the next couple of years,” he said.
Sassano pointed out that some Ethereum core developers are even discussing a potential fivefold increase in the gas limit within the next year.
ETH gas limit goal can be achieved through repricing transactions
It is an important development for Ethereum users as a higher gas limit allows Ethereum to fit more work into each block, including swaps, token transfers and smart contract calls.
Sassano said developers can achieve this by rebalancing transaction costs, making some activities cheaper on Ethereum while increasing the expense of others.
“We can lower the cost of a basic ETH transfer from 21,000 gas to 6,000 gas, which is an over 70% cost reduction, while keeping the gas limit the same,” he said, explaining that by redistributing costs in this way and repricing other activities, the network could ultimately support higher gas limits.
“We’re basically trading efficiencies here,” Sassano said. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was among those advocating a potential fivefold increase, proposing higher costs for operations that are “relatively inefficient to process.”
Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade is expected to happen next week
Sassano co-authored the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) with Ethereum core developer Ben Adams, and the pair are aiming to include it in Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade, expected in the first half of 2026.
Several Ethereum developers recently weighed in on the network’s recent increase to a 60 million gas limit, a move supported by more than 513,000 validators. Adams was one of those who said in an X post on Friday, “Remember when ‘double L1 gas’ sounded spicy on Twitter?”
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“The Ethereum gas limit debate went from ‘too risky’ to ‘already live’ in under a year,” Adams said. Echoing a similar sentiment, Ethereum core developer Toni Wahrstätter said, “That’s a 2× increase in a single year — and it’s only the beginning.”
It comes ahead of a forthcoming major network upgrade, called Fusaka, which aims to improve Ethereum’s scalability. On Oct. 29, the upgrade made its way into the Hoodi testnet, the final step before its mainnet debut on Dec. 3.
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