Ethereum Co-Founder Proposes 16.77 Million Gas Cap to Combat Network Attacks
TLDR:
EIP-7983 proposes a 16.77M gas cap to limit high-cost Ethereum transactions.
Cap would block complex txs that consume entire block limits, reducing DoS risk.
Rule to be hardcoded into Ethereum clients and enforced in the txpool.
Change could pressure developers to streamline contract efficiency and logic.
Ethereum developers are advancing a new proposal to set a firm ceiling on how much gas a single transaction can use.
The move, led by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and researcher Toni Wahrstätter, aims to improve network stability and security. Their draft, EIP-7983, suggests capping transaction gas usage at 16.77 million, a figure that equates to 2^24. This change is intended to guard against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and improve transaction predictability.
As discussions unfold, the broader community is now weighing the benefits of efficiency against concerns over developer flexibility.
Ethereum Cap Designed to Prevent Network Abuse
The proposal targets a known vulnerability where a single transaction could consume the full block gas limit.
According to EIP-7983, this unrestricted usage risks overloading nodes, creating an uneven transaction load across the network. Limiting each transaction to 16.77 million gas seeks to prevent such bottlenecks.
Wahrstätter and Buterin argue this cap would make Ethereum more resilient to spam-style DoS attacks. The current structure allows complex operations to dominate blocks, leaving little space for other transactions. By enforcing a ceiling, they believe block validation will become smoother and more predictable.
Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter have co-authored EIP-7983, a draft proposal to introduce a protocol-level cap on the maximum gas usage per transaction at 16.77 million (2^24). By implementing this limit, Ethereum can enhance its resilience against certain DoS vectors,…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) July 6, 2025
Besides mitigating abuse, the cap could benefit zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs) and multi-threaded execution. Splitting transactions into smaller chunks makes them easier to verify and distribute across different processing threads.
Ethereum researcher Alva noted that imposing a limit might force developers to write more efficient contracts. This would help reduce state bloat and streamline block processing.
However, the tradeoff may be a temporary reduction in flexibility for complex decentralized apps.
Validation Rules to Be Hardcoded
If approved, the new rule will be hardcoded into Ethereum clients. Any transaction requesting more than the 16.77 million gas limit will be automatically rejected. The cap would apply even if a block has space left under its total gas limit.
Ethereum’s current block gas limit often exceeds this proposed threshold, but under EIP-7983, individual transactions will face tighter constraints. This change will also extend to the transaction pool (txpool), where transactions above the limit will be filtered out before block inclusion.
The cap introduces a strict change in how high-gas transactions are processed. Although most current dApps use far less gas, edge cases remain. Some developers may need to restructure operations to fit within the new boundary.
According to ongoing forum discussions, some power users believe this could slow innovation, especially for tools requiring complex computation. Yet others argue that predictability and network health must take priority in Ethereum’s scaling roadmap.
