Some Ethereum developers have launched an initiative to raise the gas limit to 40 million, which they expect will lead to a 15% to 33% reduction in layer 1 transaction costs.

Last week, the Ethereum community celebrated the deployment of the Dencun hard fork on the mainnet, which introduced blob-carrying transactions for rollup solutions. While some layer 2 networks saw a 99% drop in fees almost immediately after the upgrade went live, fees on the base layer still remain relatively high.

Two Ethereum developers say the solution to this problem could be raising the gas limit from the current 30 million to 40 million, which could potentially lead to an estimated 15% to 33% reduction in layer 1 transaction costs.

Eric Connor, an Ethereum core developer, and Mariano Conti, the former head of smart contracts at MakerDAO, have spearheaded an effort called “pump the gas,” calling on solo stakers, client teams, staking pools and other members of the community to join the initiative.

A @Rocket_Pool validator proposed a block with 40m gas limit#pumpthegas pic.twitter.com/Mvb4qUrhMZ

— mariano.eth | 🦇🔊 (@nanexcool) March 20, 2024

On the initiative’s website, the developers proposed increasing the execution gas limit to 40 million or higher, increasing the blob count from three to eight, and implementing EIP-7623, which is a proposal to limit the max block size. It also references a similar call to action from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in January. 

The developers explained that raising the gas limit by a third would give the layer 1 network the ability to process 33% more transaction load in a day. Raising the gas limit too much, however, could create a scenario where the chain becomes too large for solo node operators to validate and download, they warned.

3/ Yes, Ethereum is scaling on L2 but there is still room on L1 as well and I personally strongly believe the gas limit raise will end up perfectly safe.

My node is voting for 40mn, feel free to vote whatever you’d like, that’s the beauty of this.

— eric.eth (@econoar) March 20, 2024

“After discussion with multiple community stakeholders, this feels like a reasonable amount to raise the limit without putting the network at risk,” said the developers on the website for the initiative.