Ethereum Foundation Announces Gas Limit Cap for Upcoming Fusaka Upgrade

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has announced a change to the upcoming Fusaka hard fork that will introduce a per-transaction gas limit cap.

The EF unveiled the change via its blog today, with the update, also known as EIP-7825, already live on the Holesky and Sepolia testnet networks. EIP-7825 is expected to launch on the Ethereum mainnet when Fusaka goes live in December.

Currently, a single transaction can fill an entire block’s 45 million gas limit, which could inhibit parallel execution and open the door to Denial of Service (DOS) attacks. The change will set a per-transaction gas limit of 16.78 million to mitigate potential issues.

The change will have little to no impact on the average user and mostly affects developers with contract or script designs that involve batching.

Toni Wahrstatter, a researcher at the EF, posted on X today about the change, saying that developers should consider testing on the Sepolia testnet, where the cap is live, and double-check signatures, deployers, tooling, and transaction sizes on their contracts.

“This is one step toward parallel execution (see EIP-7928: Block-level Access Lists). By enforcing predictable transaction sizes, Ethereum prepares for higher throughput and safer scaling,” concluded Wahrstatter.

Fusaka lays the groundwork for a future pivot towards parallel execution on Ethereum — a modern transaction processing model in which transactions are processed simultaneously rather than in the traditional sequential order.

While developers look ahead to the upgrade, ETH continues to trade sideways alongside BTC, as major tokens look to find their footing following the Oct. 10 market crash. ETH is down 12% over the last month but up 48% over the last year.