Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, together with researcher Toni Wahrstätter, proposed a protocol-level cap on the gas limit for individual transactions to 16.77 million gas.

The proposed gas cap is part of a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-7983, a modified version of the stagnant EIP-7825, and aims to reduce DoS attack vectors, improve network stability, and enable fairer gas allocation among transactions within blocks.

EIP-7825 was a proposal to set a protocol-level cap of 30 million gas per transaction introduced last November, but did not advance beyond draft status.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

EIP-7983’s newly proposed and significantly lower limit would be independent of the block gas limit set by validators, meaning validators can still adjust block gas limits, but no single transaction can exceed the cap.

“The proposed cap of 16,777,216 gas (2^24) provides a balance between allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution bounds,” the proposal explained.

It also encourages breaking large transactions into smaller fragments, which improves compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs).