Ethereum Reaches 60M Gas Limit Before Fusaka Upgrade: The Throughput and Readiness Data

Ethereum's Gas Limit Hike: Problem Solved? Not So Fast.

The 60M Gas Limit: What the Validators Voted For Ethereum just cranked up its block gas limit to 60 million, a jump from 45 million. That's a 33% increase, and the highest it's been in four years. The Ethereum Foundation's Toni Wahrstätter is calling it a "culmination of a year-long community effort." All the validators had to do was signal approval, and boom, automatic adjustment on November 25th. More transactions per block, potentially easing congestion. Sounds great, right? Independent blockchain researcher Zhixiong Pan points to three things making this possible: EIP-7623 (protocol-level block-size safeguards), client optimizations, and testnet results. Basically, they’re saying they stress-tested it and it didn’t break. But is it *really* that simple?

Gas Limit Lift: A Genuine Boost or Just Shifting Bottlenecks?

Digging Into the Details: The Devil's in the Data Availability The timing is… interesting. This gas limit increase is landing right before the Fusaka hard fork, slated for December 3rd. Fusaka's big selling point is PeerDAS – a redesign of data availability sampling. Vitalik Buterin himself called it "key to Ethereum scaling." So, are we actually seeing a genuine increase in Ethereum's base-layer capacity, or are we just shifting the bottleneck somewhere else? Here's where my skepticism kicks in. The articles mention Ethereum scaling networks hitting 31,000 transactions per second (TPS). Impressive. But Lighter, a zero-knowledge rollup, is doing the heavy lifting at 5,455 TPS. Base is lagging far behind with only 137 TPS. The rest are contributing "smaller but steady" amounts. (A parenthetical clarification: GrowThePie is the source for this TPS data.) What happens when everyone piles onto Lighter? Or when another ZK-rollup becomes the hot ticket? Are these TPS numbers sustainable, or are we looking at a system that’s only as strong as its current leader? If the throughput is concentrated in a single rollup, the gas limit increase on the main chain becomes almost irrelevant for the average user. It's like widening a highway that feeds into a one-lane bridge. And this is the part I find genuinely puzzling. If PeerDAS is so crucial to Ethereum scaling, why wasn't it implemented *before* the gas limit increase? Wouldn't it make more sense to optimize the data availability layer first, then increase capacity? It feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse. Buterin suggests future adjustments might pair gas limit increases with higher gas costs for computationally expensive operations. This sounds like a band-aid solution. Instead of tackling the root cause of network inefficiencies, they're talking about penalizing users for using certain features. How does that foster innovation or encourage broader adoption?

Gas Limit Boost: Real Fix or Just a Patch?

What's Next? More Tweaks and Targeted Optimizations So, where does this leave us? The gas limit has increased. The validators are happy. But the underlying question remains: is this a real, sustainable improvement, or just a temporary fix masking deeper architectural issues? Ethereum Reaches 60M Gas Limit Before Fusaka Upgrade. Wahrstätter and Buterin are hinting at a potential 5x gas limit increase by 2026. Zhixiong Pan correctly points out that this requires optimizing cryptographic operations, controlling state bloat, and improving network propagation. (A self-correction for precision: The gas limit increase was not about 50%, but 33%). These are not trivial challenges. I've looked at hundreds of these blockchain scaling reports, and the focus is always on the theoretical maximums. What I want to see is data on real-world performance under sustained load, across *all* scaling solutions, not just the ones that are currently trending. The Data Smells Funny