Pump the gas is an effort to educate the Ethereum community about the gas limit and how it can be used to help improve Ethereum scaling. Signal your social support and spread our effort on twitter or farcaster. Use the hashtag #pumpthegas

I'm generally a gas bull and think it is time for a gas limit increase. I think the best would be a package of measures:

Increase execution gas limit (to 40m or even more)

Increase blob count (3->8)

Implement EIP-7623 to limit the max block size

Dankrad Feist on Twitter

I think doing a modest gas limit increase even today is reasonable. The gas limit has not been increased for nearly three years[...]. an increase to around 40M or so.

Vitalik Buterin from a Reddit AMA

SOLO STAKERS - What you can do

If you are a solo staker you can increase the gas limit today by adding a flag to your client configuration.

If you use Dappnode you can go to your client package > config > show advanced editor > EXTRA_OPTS

Consensus Client (externally produced blocks)

                # Lighthouse (validator client)
--gas-limit 36000000

# Lodestar (validator client)
--defaultGasLimit 36000000

# Nimbus
--suggested-gas-limit=36000000

# Prysm (validator client)
--suggested-gas-limit 36000000

# Teku
--Xvalidators-builder-registration-default-gas-limit=36000000

              

Execution Client (locally produced blocks)

              # Besu
--target-gas-limit 36000000

# Erigon
--miner.gaslimit 36000000

# Geth
--miner.gaslimit 36000000

# Nethermind
--Blocks.TargetBlockGasLimit 36000000

# Reth
--builder.gaslimit 36000000

            

After changing your configuration, you should restart your client.

Source

Validator Check

Check if a validator is ready for the gas limit increase:

CLIENT TEAMS - What you can do

Increase the gas limit to 36000000 in your client so it's the default in future releases. This will by far be the most effective way to make sure everyone is running clients with this configuration.

BIG POOLS - What you can do

Increase the gas limit to 36000000 in all your clients.

FAQ

What is the gas block limit?

Understanding 'gas' is fundamental to understanding how the Ethereum network functions.

The EVM - the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) running on each Ethereum node - is an emulation of a computer system. One example of a regular, non-blockchain virtual machine is the VirtualBox software, which allows you to emulate computer systems (guests) on your physical hardware (hosts). Any operation in the EVM consumes CPU cycles, disk access, memory, of the hosting machine (which carries a cost). This cost is paid via Ethereum 'gas'.

In order to prevent "overload" of the host, each operation on the EVM consumes a certain amount of gas. Accessing memory or writing to disk have differing costs with each EVM operator setting an upper limit to the gas consumed during execution of a contract. So, if a malicious operator crafted a smart contract that went into an infinite loop, each loop would consume some gas and eventually run into the limit, at which point the EVM would abort the execution of this contract. Essentially, the larger, more complex the contract and the more operations it performs, the more expensive it is to run it.

There are many key components to a transaction that are important to understand:

Term	Description
Gas	Unit for how much computation work is done.
Gas Price	How much you're willing to pay per gas for work (in gwei)
Tx Cost	Gas used * Gas Price
Gas Limit	Max gas you'll pay for a certain tx
Gas Block Limit	Max gas allowed in a block

What is the curent gas block limit?

30,000,000

What are we targetting for the new gas block limit?

36,000,000

Why this target specifically?

After discussion with multiple community stakeholders, this feels like a reasonable amount to raise the limit without putting the network at risk.

How does this help Ethereum?

Raising the gas block limit 20% gives Layer 1 Ethereum the ability to process 20% more transaction load in a day. This has the potential to lower gas fees on L1. It's estimated this could reduce tx fees ~10-30%.

What about blobs?

Blobs (EIP-4844) help greatly reduce Layer 2 transaction fees, not Layer 1 transaction fees. A combination of blobs + gas limit increase can help scale both L1 and L2 Ethereum.

Why not go even higher?

It's important to remember that one of the core goals of Ethereum is to remain as decentralized as possible. If the gas limit is raised too high we could create a scenario where the chain becomes too large for solo node operators to validate and download. Technology improves however and it does make sense to slowly increase it as time goes on. Another important factor to consider is if we raise it too fast, we may run into unexpected externalities, beyond just storage and bandwidth requirements.

What can we do to make gas increases safer?

We think there are 2 EIPs that are very important to allowing even further increases in the future. These are EIP-7623 and EIP-4444, both of which the Ethereum community should seriously consider.

How can I view the progress of this effort?

You can view the latest blocks with a gas limit over 30M over at Blockchair. You can also see a bar chart over at Dune.

I'm in, how can I help?

If you're a validator, you can set flags on your execution clients and consensus clients to signal that you'd like to raise the gas limit. Please see above for these flags.

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