Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist on Sunday filed the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 9698, a plan to let the blockchain’s gas limit grow on autopilot over the next four years.
Feist is best known in crypto circles for his efforts in scaling the Ethereum network. The “danksharding” element of the network’s Dencun update was named after him.
The EIP introduces a deterministic “exponential” schedule baked into client defaults, which nudges the gas limit upward by a tiny preset amount every epoch. These predictable gas limit increases allow current validators to keep their machines up to speed — cutting the need for sudden upgrades.
If approved and implemented, the gas limit ceiling would climb from 36 million units to roughly 3.6 billion, allowing an estimated 6,000 simple transfers per block and over 2,000 transactions per second (TPS).
Client teams would still need to ship the code and leave the setting on by default, while operators could override it manually.
“The current gas limit mechanism relies on miner/operator voting, which lacks coordination and predictability,” Feist wrote in a Github post as the motivation behind the proposal. “While flexible, this approach can lead to stagnation or overly cautious increases.”
“By introducing a predictable exponential growth pattern as a client default, this EIP encourages a sustainable and transparent gas limit trajectory, aligned with expected advancements in hardware and protocol efficiency,” Feist added.
The proposal sets an activation point at Beacon-chain epoch 369017, roughly June 1. An epoch lasts 6.4 minutes and consists of 32 slots, each containing a block, which stores data and adds to the chain.
EIP-9698 now awaits review by client maintainers and core developers. If they flip the switch this June, Ethereum’s throughput curve could look very different by 2029—no hard fork required.
The proposal comes as Ethereum faces competition from a bloated landscape of blockchains that offer faster settlement times and significantly lower fees, leading to an exodus of financial activity and users to other networks in the past years.
