Ethereum’s throughput ticked up on Sunday as more validators signalled their support for increasing Ethereum’s gas limit to 45 million units, which will reduce transaction fees and enable improved network scaling.  

Ethereum’s gas limit rose to over 37.3 million units on Sunday, according to Etherscan, up almost 3% from levels late last week, while several blocks were proposed with higher gas limits.

The latest gas limit increase represents the first significant climb since February, when it was raised from 30 million to 36 million.

Improved transaction throughput

Higher gas limits mean more transaction throughput on Ethereum’s layer-1 network, and validators can automatically adjust the limit by about 0.1% per block when they signal support for changes.

Ethereum throughput ticked up to just below 18 transactions per second over the weekend, according to Chainspect. It has also risen since the last gas limit increase when TPS was around 15. 

Validators agree to “pump the gas”

The weekend gas limit increase came as nearly half of all staked Ether (ETH) is now signaling support to raise the gas limit to 45 million or higher through a grassroots “pump the gas” campaign.

“Almost exactly 50% of stake are voting to increase the L1 gas limit to 45 million,” observed Vitalik Buterin on Sunday.

Currently, 47.2% of staked validators are in favor of higher gas limits, according to GasLimits.pics.

Pump the gas 

The gas limit refers to the maximum amount of gas spent on executing transactions or smart contracts in each block. Gas is the Ether fee required to conduct a transaction or execute a smart contract on the network.

Ethereum developers launched the “pump the gas” campaign in March 2024 to initially raise the Ethereum gas limit from 30 million to 40 million, which they claimed would reduce transaction fees on layer 1.

Buterin noted that recent Geth, the most popular Ethereum node client, team improvements make these scale increases safer with new archive node optimizations.

Related: More than 50% of validators signal to increase ETH gas limit

Ether activity and price continue higher

Ethereum network activity has also increased in recent months, with an uptick in daily transactions from around 1.1 million in April to current levels around 1.4 million, according to Etherscan. 

The uptick in network activity has correlated with an increase in price, with the asset gaining a whopping 54% over the past month. 

Ether topped $3,800 briefly in a seven-month high on Sunday as corporate treasuries and exchange-traded funds continue to load up. 

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]]> https://earlybirdsinvest.com/ethereum-is-scaling-tps-gas-limit-up-as-validators-back-45m-target/feed/ 0 48821 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/solana-network-extensions-will-redefine-blockchain-scaling/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/solana-network-extensions-will-redefine-blockchain-scaling/#respond Sun, 22 Jun 2025 15:11:15 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/solana-network-extensions-will-redefine-blockchain-scaling/

The following is a guest post and opinion from Aryan Sheikhalian, Head of Research at CMT Digital.

Ethereum is betting big on a future filled with rollups. But in typical Solana fashion, the network is taking a different route—one that doesn’t just scale more blockspace, but bespoke execution environments with first-class developer control.

Enter Network Extensions, Solana’s most important—and misunderstood—infrastructure innovation to date. While they’re often compared to sidechains or dismissed as Solana’s version of appchains, that framing undersells what’s really happening here. Network Extensions allow for custom execution environments that don’t fragment liquidity or composability—unlocking a new frontier for application-specific blockspace without breaking the core network apart.

This isn’t just a scaling strategy. It’s a statement about how the future of crypto infrastructure will work.

Solana’s modular, L1-integrated extensions preserve validator security, support differentiated consensus and transaction logic, and offer developers more design surface without forcing them to launch new chains or settle for constrained rollups. That’s a big deal for anyone building high-performance applications—from games to DePIN to real-world finance.

While Ethereum L2s offload computation and struggle with fragmented liquidity, Solana is building something quieter but more elegant: a unified, highly customizable L1 that treats specialization as a first-class primitive. And in doing so, it might just leapfrog the rollup wars entirely.

Customization Without Fragmentation

Ethereum’s Layer-2s were built to scale. Solana’s Network Extensions were built to specialize.
While Ethereum rollups increase throughput, they all run essentially the same playbook—general-purpose blockspace, minimal variation, and fragmented liquidity across siloed chains. The architecture improves efficiency, but not flexibility.

Solana takes a different view. Network Extensions let developers define their own execution environments from the ground up. They can customize consensus mechanisms, transaction logic, dedicated storage, and isolated environments that don’t compete with mainnet traffic. More importantly, they do it without breaking composability or spinning up entirely new chains.

Data Availability, Solana Style

Unlike Ethereum’s standardized rollups, Solana has not mandated a single approach to Network Extensions. That’s by design. It invites experimentation—so long as extensions validate state transitions and anchor them to Layer 1, preserving Solana’s unified state and liquidity.
To achieve this, Solana has introduced specialized data lanes, akin to Ethereum’s blobspace for rollups. One of the most promising developments is ZK Compression, a joint effort by Helius and Light Protocol. By compressing account state and using zk-proofs to validate state transitions, ZK Compression offers a glimpse into how Solana can scale without sacrificing verifiability or speed.

Comparing Ethereum’s Approach: Throughput Over Customization

While Solana is enhancing execution environments with Network Extensions, Ethereum is focusing on two major scalability improvements: Layer-2 rollups and preconfirmations.

• Rollups bundle transactions off-chain, then submit them to Ethereum L1. The tradeoff? Fragmented liquidity and independent state.
• Preconfirmations aim to reduce perceived latency by issuing soft guarantees before block inclusion. Useful? Sure. Transformative? Not really.

Solana’s approach skips the workaround entirely. With sub-second finality, it doesn’t need preconfirmations. And with Network Extensions, it avoids the L2 complexity tax by keeping specialized execution environments anchored to a unified chain.

Why This Matters for Builders

For developers, Network Extensions lower the barriers to launching custom environments—without the overhead of managing an entirely new chain or compromising user experience. This unlocks a long tail of blockchain applications that don’t want to live inside generalized blockspace.
Customization has already proven its value as a driver of innovation.. Network Extensions encourage experimentation by providing secure, flexible execution environments for applications. Specifically, consumer-focused applications—where abstraction and UX optimization are paramount—stand to benefit the most.
Applications that stand to benefit include:

• DeFi: Custom execution environments enable high-frequency trading, low-latency transactions, and built-in regulatory compliance features like KYC enforcement.
• Supply Chain Management: Isolated environments facilitate complex logistics workflows, ensuring data integrity and real-time tracking without burdening the mainnet.
• DePIN and IoT: Extensions can efficiently process data from IoT devices and integrate with blockchain-based DePIN networks.
• Gaming: Dedicated resources allow for near-instant settlements and optimized in-game economies.

What Comes Next?

Network Extensions mark a shift in how blockchains can scale—not just by handling more transactions, but by supporting more types of applications. As more developers’ experiment with specialized execution environments, Solana’s infrastructure could evolve into a network of purpose-built layers that remain unified at the base.

This model stands in contrast to the fragmentation creeping into other ecosystems. Rather than offloading scale to separate rollups or appchains, Solana keeps customization close to the core. That reduces friction, preserves composability, and gives developers more room to build without starting from scratch. This approach could yield custom-tailored DeFi platforms, next-gen consumer applications, and institutional blockchain environments compliant with real-world regulations.

The success of Network Extensions will depend on developer adoption, tooling, and real-world deployment. But the early signs are promising. If executed well, this strategy could redefine blockchain infrastructure, shifting the focus from mere scalability to flexibility, adaptability, and application-specific performance.

Mentioned in this article

The Ethereum mainnet’s gas limit could theoretically grow 100-fold and reach 2,000 transactions per second under a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) put forward by Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist.

Feist, who had the blockchain’s “danksharding” data storage solution named after him, put forward EIP-9698 on April 27, which would introduce a “deterministic gas limit growth schedule” starting at epoch 369017, or around June 1.

The proposal would gradually increase the gas limit by a factor of 10 for roughly two years, or 164,250 epochs, when one final tenfold increase would occur.

Ethereum clients would need to vote on the proposal for it to take effect, Feist said.

“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,” he added.

As Ethereum can occasionally reach up to 20 TPS in blocks dominated by simple transactions, a 100x gas limit increase could theoretically increase Ethereum’s TPS to 2,000. Feist’s proposal would better position Ethereum to compete with the likes of Solana, which currently processes a non-vote TPS between 800 to 1,050 and has a theoretical TPS of 65,000.

The EIP would expand the current gas limit of 36 million to 3.6 billion, potentially allowing around 6,000 transactions to fit into Ethereum blocks.

Feist’s proposal comes after Ethereum validators agreed to raise the gas limit from 30 million to 36 million in February.

Before that, the last change to Ethereum’s gas limit occurred in August 2021 under the London hard fork, where the figure was roughly doubled from 15 million to 30 million.

Feist acknowledged that a rapid increase in the gas limit under his proposal may stress less-optimized nodes and increase block propagation times. 

“However, the exponential schedule with very gradual increments per epoch gives node operators and developers ample time to adapt and optimize,” he said.

Related: Ethereum community members propose new fee structure for the app layer

EIP-9698 marks the Ethereum community’s latest effort to boost scalability at the base layer after predominantly focusing on scaling through layer 2 solutions in recent years.

Critics of Ethereum’s layer-2 focused strategy claim that it has fragmented the ecosystem into several siloed chains with little interoperability, leading to a worse user experience.

EIP-9678 looks to increase gas limit

Ethereum developers are also looking to test a fourfold increase of Ethereum’s gas limit in the Fusaka hard fork under EIP-9678.

Fusaka has been flagged as possibly going online in late 2025, while the next major Ethereum upgrade, Pectra, is scheduled to go live on the mainnet in May.

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]]> https://earlybirdsinvest.com/researcher-proposes-scaling-ethereum-gas-limit-by-100x-over-4-years/feed/ 0 33190 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/ethereum-foundation-pivots-focus-to-l1-scaling-frees-vitalik-buterin-for-research-innovation/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/ethereum-foundation-pivots-focus-to-l1-scaling-frees-vitalik-buterin-for-research-innovation/#respond Mon, 21 Apr 2025 11:55:01 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/ethereum-foundation-pivots-focus-to-l1-scaling-frees-vitalik-buterin-for-research-innovation/