Features writer

Jeffrey Gogo

Features writer

Jeffrey Gogo

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Jeffrey Gogo is a journalist with 20 years of experience in business, finance, cryptocurrency, and climate change news and analysis.

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Last updated: 

September 15, 2025

Key Takeaways:

• Vitalik Buterin tested Hinkal’s “Invisible Wallet,” a new tool that hides wallet activity to protect users from hacks.
• Crypto hacks surged to $163 million in August, rising for the third month a row.
• Analysts say privacy wallets can reduce exposure for high-net-worth holders, but warn they’re not a silver bullet against determined tracking.
• While zero-knowledge proofs allow for privacy-preserving compliance, experts say legal alignment remains uncertain.

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin has been testing Hinkal’s new ‘Invisible Wallet,’ a privacy tool that could mark a breakthrough at a time when wealthy wallets are increasingly targeted by hackers.

It comes as losses from crypto hacks soared to $163 million in August, rising for the third month in a row, according to PeckShield. In the last five years alone, crypto investors have lost over $4 billion in targeted attacks.

Web3 firm Hinkal says its wallet allows users to hide their on-chain activity. It claims that users, especially those with big balances, can use the wallet to deter attacks without compromising regulatory compliance.

Hinkal CEO Giorgi Koreli described crypto’s in-built transparency as a “bug”. He says it is not “normal” that over $4 trillion in crypto assets on public blockchains “can be monitored and potentially weaponized by others.”

“Privacy-preserving wallets are the future, because free surveillance and tracking can’t be,” Koreli argues.

In his test transfer in late August, Buterin sent 0.01 ETH ($44) from his wallet to an address owned by Hinkal using its invisible wallet, according to Etherscan data. Buterin’s wallet address is publicly labeled vitalik.eth.

As seen in the image below, Hinkal kept track of the Ethereum founder’s activity but did not share any more of his internal transactions for privacy reasons. Even his well-known address is obfuscated in the transaction record.

“If your assets can be watched, your transaction can be mapped and traced at every interaction,” Koreli wrote in an article posted on X. “It’s not freedom. It’s additional exposure.”

Hinkal’s Invisible Wallet ‘Is Not a Silver Bullet’

The blockchain is, by design, a public ledger that broadcasts wallet activity. As Koreli puts it, every transaction, position, and trading strategy is visible to competitors, as well as cybercriminals.

He says crypto’s “radical transparency” has been a major obstacle, discouraging privacy-focused institutions in traditional finance from investing in the “$50 billion” decentralized finance (DeFi) market.

Slava Demchuk, CEO of blockchain analytics firm AMLBot, said tools like Hinkal’s invisible wallet can raise the bar for personal security by shielding wallet balances and transaction histories from opportunistic attackers.

“For high-net-worth holders, that additional layer of privacy reduces the risk of targeted hacks, phishing attempts, or even physical threats,” Demchuk told Cryptonews, adding:

“Of course, as with any system, ultimate protection depends on adoption, decentralization, robustness of the cryptography behind it, and, most importantly, on users’ own caution.”

Invisible wallets, like Hinkal’s, act as cloaking devices. Transactions can still be validated on-chain, but sensitive details, such as wallet addresses, amounts, or counterparties, remain hidden from public scrutiny, experts say.

Yury Serov, head of investigations at analytics firm Global Ledger, lauded the privacy wallet for removing the most obvious exposure points, namely the appearance of a public address in swaps, lending and routine DeFi use.

But this “invisible” must not be conflated with “invulnerable.” For example, he says, if someone moves unusually large amounts when the liquidity pool is thin, bad actors may easily correlate deposits and withdrawals.

“Timing patterns, transaction sizes, and even metadata from relayers can give away more than users expect,” Serov tells Cryptonews, adding:

“In practice, this means Hinkal makes it much harder for casual observers or opportunistic attackers to track big wallets, but it won’t make a whale completely disappear from a determined investigation.”

According to Serov, Hinkal’s Invisible Wallet “is best viewed as a layer of risk reduction, not a silver bullet.”

Can Privacy and Compliance Coexist?

Hinkal insists that its wallet can be both private and compliant at the same time. Experts aren’t so sure. According to AMLBot CEO Demchuk, it is technically feasible for the wallet to comply with the rules while private.

“Yes, users do pass KYC requirements, and zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs allow them to demonstrate eligibility without exposing personal data,” he noted. “However, from a legal standpoint, it’s not entirely compliant yet.”

Under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, service providers may still be required to act as data controllers, creating “a gap between technical compliance and regulatory obligations,” he said.

The blockchain analyst brought up PureFi as an alternative framework that verifies compliance checks on-chain while ensuring that service providers retain the role of data controller.

“So, while Hinkal’s approach is innovative, there are still open questions about full regulatory alignment,” said Demchuk.

Global Ledger’s Serov concurred with Demchuk, saying that with ZK proofs, users can prove they have already passed (know your customer) KYC verification with a regulated exchange or that they are not on the sanctions list, to participate.

He explains:

“Historically, regulators and policymakers have sometimes seen privacy as being in direct opposition to financial crime compliance. But today, technological advances are moving so quickly that it may no longer be necessary to sacrifice one goal to achieve the other.”

But not everyone is entirely convinced. Didier Lavallée, CEO of Canadian crypto firm Tetra Trust, says Hinkal’s compliance model is “unclear”.

“You would need some kind of token or verification system to confirm it is compliant,” Lavallée told Cryptonews. Still, the service might be useful for institutions that continue to use permissioned blockchains, he said.

Vitalik Wants Privacy Wired Into the Blockchain

Vitalik Buterin has occasionally revisited the question of privacy in his blogs. He usually breaks down the “moon math” that is required to code privacy protocols such as zero-knowledge proofs into Ethereum.

His simple solution is to wire privacy into the blockchain itself rather than add it on top of the blockchain in the form of a wallet, for example.

“Up until now, making private transfers on Ethereum has required users to explicitly download and use a ‘privacy wallet’, such as Railway (or Umbra for stealth addresses),” Buterin explains in one blog entry.

“This adds great inconvenience and reduces the number of people who are willing to make private transfers. The solution is that private transfers need to be integrated directly into wallets.”

One of his proposed implementations would have wallets store a portion of a user’s assets as a “private balance” in a privacy pool.

“When a user makes a transfer, it would automatically withdraw from the privacy pool first,” says Buterin. “If a user needs to receive funds, the wallet could automatically generate a stealth address.”

Invisible Wallet: Transparency vs. Privacy

Hinkal’s privacy tool challenges crypto’s core ethos of transparency. After all, blockchain was built to let “everyone see everything.” However, some crypto analysts argue the wallet reframes crypto transparency rather than ends it.

“Instead of putting every detail of a user’s balance and trades on-chain, it uses zero-knowledge proofs to make only the necessary facts verifiable,” said Serov, the Global Ledger head of investigations, adding:

“In other words, it tries to preserve the trustless auditability of crypto while reducing the personal exposure that comes with full transparency. Hinkal reflects a shift from ‘everyone sees everything’ to ‘everyone can verify what matters.’”

AMLBot’s Demchuk spoke about balancing transparency with privacy. “Transparency has always been core to blockchain, but privacy is equally fundamental, especially when financial security is at stake,” he detailed.

“Public ledgers can remain auditable, while individual users gain choice over what information they reveal.”

Meanwhile, Hinkal could face much bigger problems. Privacy tools have historically drawn sharp reactions from regulators.

In 2022, for example, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Ethereum-based mixing service Tornado Cash on allegations of facilitating billions in laundered funds. Its cofounder, Roman Storm, was indicted in the U.S. for money laundering.

“There are some legitimate use cases of the (Hinkal) app, like payroll or protection from dusting attacks,” Serov noted. “But this innovation is likely to attract regulators’ attention in advanced regulatory regimes, like the EU.”

Without a MiCA license, or Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation, Hinkal will not be able to offer its privacy-enhanced crypto custody solution in the European Union, according to Serov.

“Under the new AMLR, crypto asset services providers will not be allowed to facilitate transactions with privacy coins or anonymous accounts from July 2027. Such privacy-enhancing solutions will be effectively outlawed.”

Analysts say Hinkal’s wallet will likely be pushed out into jurisdictions that don’t yet have similar regulations in place.

“Unlike mixers, which anonymize flows without checks, Hinkal integrates privacy-preserving KYC and access tokens,” said Demchuk. “That gives regulators a framework to distinguish it from ‘black box’ laundering tools.”

Data from Global Ledger shows that Tornado Cash received roughly $1.5 billion worth of ETH between Jan. 1 and Sept. 5 this year (see image above).

Serov said around 36% of the funds are “high-risk” and come from hacks, such as the Cork Protocol hack and Bybit hack, as well as sanctioned entities like Garantex and other risky sources. “The mixer poses significant AML risks,” he added.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin claims it is a “bad idea” to use artificial intelligence (AI) for governance. In an X post on Saturday, Buterin wrote:

“If you use an AI to allocate funding for contributions, people WILL put a jailbreak plus “gimme all the money” in as many places as they can.”

Why AI governance is flawed

Buterin’s post was a response to Eito Miyamura, co-founder and CEO of EdisonWatch, an AI data governance platchorm who revealed a fatal flaw in ChatGPT. In a post on Friday, Miyamura wrote that the addition of full support for MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools on ChatGPT has made the AI agent susceptible to exploitation.

The update, which came into effect on Wednesday, allows ChatGPT to connect and read data from several apps, including Gmail, Calendar, and Notion.

Miyamura noted that with just an email address, the update has made it possible to “exfiltrate all your private information.” Miscreants can gain access to your data in three simple steps, Miyamura explained:

First, the attackers send a malicious calendar invite with a jailbreak prompt to the intended victim. A jailbreak prompt refers to code that allows an attacker to remove restrictions and gain administrative access.

Miyamura noted that the victim does not have to accept the attacker’s malicious invite for the data leak to take place.

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The second step involves waiting for the intended victim to seek ChatGPT’s help to prepare for their day. Finally, once ChatGPT reads the jailbroken calendar invite, it gets compromised—the attacker can completely hijack the AI tool, make it search the victim’s private emails, and send the data to the attacker’s email.

Buterin’s alternative

Buterin suggests using the info finance approach to AI governance. The info finance approach consists of an open market where different developers can contribute their models. The market has a spot-check mechanism for such models, which can be triggered by anyone and evaluated by a human jury, Buterin wrote.

In a separate post, Buterin explained that the individual human jurors will be aided by large language models (LLMs).

According to Buterin, this type of ‘institution design’ approach is “inherently more robust.” This is because it offers model diversity in real time and creates incentives for both model developers and external speculators to police and correct for issues.

While many are excited at the prospect of having “AI as a governor,” Buterin warned:

“I think doing this is risky both for traditional AI safety reasons and for near-term “this will create a big value-destructive splat” reasons.”

Mentioned in this article

Ethereum co-creator and its frontman, Vitalik Buterin, has shared a hot take on a recent warning that OpenAI’s product, ChatGPT, can be utilized to leak personal user data.

ChatGPT can be used for leaking your data, warning says

X user @Eito_Miyamura, a software engineer and an Oxford graduate, published a post, revealing that after the new update, ChatGPT may pose a significant threat to personal user data.

Miyamura tweeted that on Wednesday, OpenAI rolled out full support for MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools in ChatGPT. This upgrade allows the AI bot to connect to a user’s Gmail box, Google Calendar, SharePoint, and other services.

However, Miyamura and his friends spotted a fundamental security issue here: “AI agents like ChatGPT follow your commands, not your common sense.” He and his team have staged an experiment that allowed them to exfiltrate all user private information from the aforementioned sources.

Miyamura shared all the steps they followed to perform this test data leak – it was done by sending a user a calendar invite with a “jailbreak prompt to the victim, just with their email.” The victim needs to accept the invite.

What happens next is the user tells ChatGPT “to help prepare for their day by looking at their calendar.” After the AI bot reads the malicious invite, it is hijacked, and from that point on it will “act on the attacker’s command.” It will “search your private emails and send the data to the attacker’s email.”

Miyamura warns that while so far ChatGPT needs a user’s approval for every step, in the future many users will likely just click “approve” on everything AI suggests. “Remember that AI might be super smart, but can be tricked and phished in incredibly dumb ways to leak your data,” the developer concludes.

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Buterin reacts to this warning

In response, Vitalik Buterin slammed the “AI governance” idea in general as “naive.” He stated that if utilized by users to “allocate funding for contributions,” hackers will hijack it to syphon all the money from users.

Instead, he suggested an alternative approach called “info finance,” which is an open market where AI models can be checked for security issues: “anyone can contribute their models, which are subject to a spot-check mechanism that can be triggered by anyone and evaluated by a human jury.”

Ethereum co-founder and its frontman, Vitalik Buterin, has made an important prediction about one of the ways AI bots may impact the future generation of people positively.

He also shared his take on a phenomenon that is quite popular at the moment — doomscrolling.

Buterin makes important AI prediction

Responding to a tweet published by X user @RuxandraTeslo about doomscrolling, Vitalik Buterin shared his take on this issue. He stated that he believes “there are good things to doomscroll and bad things to doomscroll.”

Right after that, he jumped onto another linked subject, which can be considered the doomscrolling of the future — using AI chatbots.

He predicted that AI can help shape “some of the smartest people of the next generation.” They may become that if they “spend their teenagehood curiously asking the bot all kinds of questions about science, the world, etc for hours a day.”

On the other hand, per Buterin, there will be lots of teenagers who will “waste their lives talking to AI all day about much less meaningful things.”

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The Black Swan’s author on future of AI

Earlier today, the renowned scholar, statistician and author of such popular books as “The Black Swan” and “Skin in the Game,” Nassim Taleb, also opined on the future impact of artificial intelligence on humanity.

In particular, he spoke about one sphere so far — medicine. Taleb said that while AI can hardly replace doctors yet, it can disrupt the sphere of medical education by helping autodidacts educate themselves much more efficiently.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and researcher Anders Elowsson have introduced a proposal to overhaul how users pay for transactions on the network.

The plan centers around a unified multidimensional fee market, designed to simplify fee calculation and improve economic efficiency across the Ethereum ecosystem.

The proposal arrives during a period of low network fees. Over the past week, Ethereum’s median gas price has consistently remained under 1 Gwei, marking the lowest levels this year.

This context emphasizes the need for a more adaptable and efficient fee structure to support future growth.

Multidimensional fee market

At the proposal’s core is a single max_fee value users set when submitting a transaction. This fee would apply across all network resources, such as computation, storage, and calldata, instead of requiring users to assign different fee limits to each.

By making max_fee fungible across these dimensions, Ethereum can allocate the fee “dynamically” to whichever resource needs it most, optimizing capital usage.

According to the proposal:

“The fee market is further unified in terms of a single update fraction under a single fee update mechanism, generalized reserve pricing, and a gas normalization that retains current percentage ranges while keeping the price stable whenever a gas limit changes.”

Currently, Ethereum operates with separate fee systems: EIP-1559 governs regular gas, while EIP-4844 covers blob gas. This proposal aims to consolidate both mechanisms under the EIP-4844 framework, providing better control over long-term resource consumption.

The multidimensional fee market design allows Ethereum to better adapt to temporary demand spikes while maintaining price stability across various resources.

The first step in the rollout would be to apply this system to calldata, which often affects transaction propagation speed. From there, additional EVM resources could be added over time, using mechanisms that maintain backward compatibility.

Ultimately, this proposal would simplify the user experience and enable more scalability in the future. It would also consolidate fee structures and enable more flexible pricing, laying the groundwork for more predictable and efficient network activity.

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The following is a guest post and opinion of Rostyslav Bortman, Founder of Ethereum Ukraine.

Even in wartime Kyiv, innovation doesn’t pause. At ETHKyiv 2025, more than 100 hackers proved it—shipping privacy-first dApps, competing for grants, and showing what’s possible when the world’s toughest challenges meet Web3 grit.

But the real shockwaves came from the founders themselves: Vitalik Buterin and Tomasz K. Stańczak, Executive Director at the Ethereum Foundation, who both appeared as the event’s online speakers, dropped two bombshells—400 TPS on Ethereum L1 this year, and a near future where anyone can run a full node on their smartphone.

So what’s next for the protocol? When does 400 TPS arrive, and what does “Ethereum on your phone” actually mean for developers and users? Here’s what we learned at ETHKyiv 2025.

Next-Gen UX: Nodes on a Phone

Vitalik Buterin’s keynote at ETHKyiv 2025 cut straight to Ethereum’s core roadmap. The biggest reveal:

“Pretty soon you’ll be able to spin up a node on your smartphones and even smartwatches.”

According to Buterin, instead of relying on servers with terabytes of storage, soon users will be able to run a full Ethereum node “without heavy-duty resources.” This first-of-its-kind case will be possible thanks to zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machines (zkEVMs) that the Ethereum Foundation is currently implementing.

zkEVMs are making nodes drastically lighter, cutting storage through verifying transactions without revealing and importing any information about them.

On Ethereum’s L2s, zkEVMs already cut transaction costs by up to 90% and settle in their finality under three seconds. Buterin said the next step is bringing these improvements to the Ethereum mainnet, making blockchain interactions on it as fast and affordable as traditional web applications.

400 TPS with 3-Slot Finality by 2026

At ETHKyiv 2025, Tomasz K. Stańczak, Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, spelled out exactly what’s next for Ethereum’s backbone: real performance gains on the mainnet itself.

He revealed that by the end of 2026, Ethereum will move to 3-Slot Finality (3SF), slashing average transaction confirmation time from 15 minutes down to only 36 seconds. For users, this will bring the experience of instant traditional digital payments while keeping all the benefits of decentralization.

Stańczak laid out the near-term milestones:

Ethereum L1 will hit 400 transactions per second (TPS) by the end of 2025.

Block gas limits will reach 100 million this year, with a jump to 60 million per block in a month or two (as of publication date—ed.).

For context: scaling Ethereum L1 is essential because it anchors the entire ecosystem, providing the security, settlement, and censorship resistance Layer 2s depend on. With faster mainnet throughput, users get greater assurance their transactions are finalized on a decentralized, global network—not bottlenecked by L2 operators.

As Vitalik Buterin summed up:

“The goal is to make Ethereum more private, more censorship-resistant, and at the same time, so easy that even people far from tech feel safe using it every day.”

What’s Really Fueling Ethereum’s Value and Mass Adoption?

For me and all the Ethereum followers, some big questions have always remained: what actually underpins Ethereum’s value, and what could trigger mass adoption?

When I pressed both Vitalik Buterin and Tomasz Stańczak for answers at ETHKyiv 2025, they each zeroed in on different but connected drivers.

Tomasz pointed to three non-negotiables: privacy, data protection, and transparency. According to him, these are precisely what enterprise clients and regular users now expect from any blockchain platform.

“Ethereum is a global network, and increased adoption directly boosts the value of the whole ecosystem,” he explained.

The more Ethereum is used for real-world utility—by businesses and by individuals—the more demand, and ultimately, value accrues.

Vitalik, meanwhile, framed the adoption question around financial utility. His thesis: mass adoption comes when Ethereum becomes the rails for real-world assets, particularly tokenized stocks and bonds.

“They’re the gateway to mass adoption and the bridge between traditional finance and Web3,” he said.

With heavyweights like BlackRock, Deutsche Bank, and Coinbase actively leveraging Ethereum for asset tokenization, we’re already seeing the lines blur between traditional finance’s $117 trillion market and Web3 infrastructure.

In short: Ethereum’s real value isn’t just speculative, but it’s being built right now at the intersection of security, privacy, and practical financial applications. That’s where mass adoption starts to look inevitable.

Why ETHKyiv 2025 Matters for Ukraine and Beyond

ETHKyiv 2025 indeed stood out for its access to global thought leaders. Despite all the war-related risks, developers here heard first-hand insights from Ethereum’s most influential builders.

As Stańczak himself described it:

“Enterprise, DeFi, explorations, AI, research, day-to-day problems, working with people—we have to understand the direction and give feedback. A lot of it.”

His daily routine—hours spent answering questions from developers—underscores how Ethereum’s power lies in its people, not just its protocol.

Crucially, ETHKyiv 2025 was never just another tech event on the calendar. Held against the backdrop of an ongoing war, it became living proof of something bigger: even in the darkest times, Ukraine’s tech community chooses to build, learn, and connect with the global ecosystem.

Throughout the hackathon, the wartime context was impossible to ignore, yet it wasn’t a shadow but a driving force. Performances by Moisei Bondarenko, the violinist-soldier whose music echoes through liberated Ukrainian cities, reminded everyone that innovation and humanity must go hand in hand. So did the tactical medicine session led by combat medic Artem Rudy, bringing practical skills and a sense of shared resilience to the room.

This is what set ETHKyiv 2025 apart: it was a gathering of minds and hearts, a testament to the persistence of community, curiosity, and shared values—even in wartime. The world watched not just for the tech, but for the spirit of resilience and solidarity that Ukraine’s builders brought to the stage.

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The Ethereum blockchain has celebrated its 10th anniversary with a peculiar uptime milestone. Speaking on the occasion of the anniversary, cofounder Vitalik Buterin spotlighted the core mission of the chain since its inception. This core mission has thrived thus far with the reported uptime, setting the protocol up for better adoption.

Vitalik Buterin on need for Ethereum uptime

In an interview that also featured Consensys Founder Joseph Lubin, Vitalik Buterin noted that the protocol has brought to life many of the things in its whitepaper. In addition to this, he noted that there have been a number of positive surprises, like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), along the way.

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Buterin added that Ethereum is a global, secure and permissionless platform. Based on its design, he noted that the goal is to give anyone the power to build general-purpose applications.

As he detailed, to do this, the protocol needs to stay online. He stated that Ethereum cannot go down, and it must maintain its censorship resistance capabilities overall.

From the Merge to the Pectra upgrade, Ethereum has undergone up to 18 upgrades since its inception. Despite this, the protocol has not suffered any downtime, a milestone that not even top tech firms can boast of.

Ethereum as treasury asset

Besides dApp building capabilities, Ethereum has now evolved to be a major treasury reserve asset for private and publicly listed firms.

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SharpLink Gaming, a firm associated with Joseph Lubin, is one of the firms leading the ETH treasury trend. As reported by U.Today, SharpLink has emerged as the new top Ethereum holder.

Tom Lee’s BitMine is also in the spotlight with a number of investments locked in to buy ETH in its treasury. These moves are poised to increase the price and market valuation of Ethereum in the long term.

As of press time, the top coin was changing hands for $3,602, down 6.8% in the past 24 hours.

Ethereum 101 for all the new kids in crypto:

Think of Ethereum as a big public computer.

People send it little jobs – like transferring ETH, swapping tokens, or running smart contracts – and every job uses up a bit of its processing power.

That processing power is called gas – basically, how much work your transaction asks the network to do.

Now, to stop anyone from totally frying the system, each block (that’s the bundle of transactions added every ~12 seconds) has a maximum gas limit – about 30M gas right now. This cap ensures the block only handles so much work at once.

But here’s the thing:

Nothing actually stops a single person from writing a huge, bloated transaction that eats up all 30M gas by itself.

That’s like walking into a laundromat and finding that one dude took every single washing machine and is still waiting with a pile of dirty socks for round two.

(If you’re reading this, laundry‑guy from my student dorm back in the day – may both sides of your pillow be warm.)

Anywayz, why’s that bad?

It leaves no room for any other transaction in that block, so everyone else has to wait for the next one = things get slower for everyone;

Malicious actors could intentionally spam huge transactions over and over to jam up the network.

Now, to be clear – this isn’t something that happens all the time. Most users and apps don’t come anywhere close to the block limit.

But it can happen, and attackers have shown a willingness to abuse other similar loopholes in Ethereum before.

So, Vitalik Buterin and researcher Toni Wahrstätter proposed a fix: EIP‑7983, which sets a new rule:

No single transaction can use more than ~16.77M gas (roughly half a block).

This way, no single transaction can dominate the entire block;

It forces large workloads to be split into smaller transactions, which are easier for the network to handle;

It keeps the network more resilient and fair.

And what does this change mean for you?

If you’re just using Ethereum casually, you probably won’t even notice when it goes live – but you’ll benefit from a more predictable, fair, and reliable network.

Plus, hey – it’s another little upgrade that shows Ethereum is still growing up, one improvement at a time.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, have put forth a proposal that will cap the maximum gas a single transaction can use. The proposal, EIP 7983, claims:

“By implementing this limit, Ethereum can enhance its resilience against certain DoS [Denial of Service attack] vectors, improve network stability, and provide more predictability to transaction processing costs.”

The latest proposal is a modified version of EIP 7825, which was introduced in November last year but has since stagnated.

The proposal will limit gas usage for individual transactions to 16.77 million gas

The proposal aims to enforce a maximum limit of 16.77 million gas for any single transaction, nearly half of the 30 million gas limit proposed in EIP 7825. This limit, according to Buterin and Wahrstätter, will be applicable irrespective of the block gas limit set by miners or validators.

Implementation of this proposal will see transactions specifying a gas limit above 16.77 million gas get invalidated. This means that during transaction validation, transactions exceeding the gas limit will be rejected and excluded from the transaction pool. Similarly, during block validation, any block that contains a transaction that exceeds the set gas limit will become invalid.

Buterin and Wahrstätter’s chosen 16.77 million gas limit will provide a “balance between allowing complex transactions while maintaining predictable execution bounds,” as per the proposal. The authors added:

“This value enables most current use cases, including contract deployments and advanced DeFi interactions, while ensuring consistent performance characteristics.”

When implemented, the proposal will require users and decentralized applications (dApps) to split transactions with higher gas limits into smaller operations. However, Buterin and Wahrstätter expect the limit to impact a minimal number of users and dApps since most current transactions fall well below the proposed limit.

Why setting a transaction gas limit matters

Ethereum’s current architecture allows transactions to theoretically consume the entire gas limit of a block. This architecture carries several risks.

For instance, allowing a single transaction to consume most or all of the block gas limit can make it easier for miscreants to execute DoS attacks. In DoS attacks, bad actors try to overwhelm a network through a barrage of spam transactions. This causes the network to fail to provide service to genuine users.

According to the proposal, the absence of a transaction gas limit can also lead to uneven load distribution and affect network stability.

Having variable gas usage can also cause an imbalance in load distribution across transactions in a block. Furthermore, high-gas transactions also cause longer block verification times, which can impact user experience.

Benefits of setting a transaction gas limit

According to Buterin and Wahrstätter, limiting the gas usage limit of single transactions can help reduce the risk of single-transaction DoS attacks. Essentially, the limit will set a guardrail that prevents malicious actors from using the network’s bandwidth through large spam transactions.

The limit would also ensure that gas is allocated fairly across transactions in a block, the proposal stated. The cap is also expected to make the validation of blocks “more predictable and uniform.”

The most important benefit, however, would be enhanced compatibility with zero-knowledge virtual machines (zkVMs). Encouraging transactions with hefty gas limits to be broken up into smaller chunks “allows better participation in distributed proving systems,” and enables “more predictable zkVM circuit design,” the proposal stated.

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