- Gas cap at $16.77 M: Transactions exceeding this ceiling will be invalidated, regardless of block gas limit.
- Bolsters security and zkVM readiness: Helps thwart DoS attacks, balances block load, and eases zkVM circuit design by encouraging smaller, predictable transaction chunks.
What happened: Ethereum introduces $16.77M gas cap via EIP‑7983
On 6 July 2025, Vitalik Buterin—co-founder of Ethereum—and Toni Wahrstätter of the Ethereum Foundation finalised and published Ethereum Improvement Proposal 7983 (EIP-7983). The draft enforces a strict per-transaction gas cap of $16.77 million gas units, overriding any higher block gas limits determined by miners or validators. Transactions submitted with a gas limit above this threshold will be rejected early—either in the transaction pool or during block validation—to ensure they never enter or disrupt the network.
This marks a refinement of the earlier EIP-7825, which proposed a 30 million gas cap in November 2024. The community feedback indicated that a lower cap would better balance advanced DeFi and contract deployment while maintaining system resilience.
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Why it’s important
By limiting how much gas a single transaction can consume, Ethereum reduces its attack surface for Denial-of-Service scenarios—where malicious or oversized transactions could otherwise monopolise block capacity, causing slower validation and unbalanced network loads.
The cap enhances transaction cost estimations and ensures fairer gas distribution within blocks. Instead of risk of one gargantuan transaction squeezing out others, multiple smaller transactions can co-exist, improving UX and throughput predictability.
Zero-knowledge virtual machines thrive on modular, predictable circuits. By forcing larger operations to be broken down, EIP-7983 simplifies zkVM proof generation and encourages participation in distributed proving systems—paving the way for more scalable and efficient ZK-based rollups.
