Ethereum's mainnet has been painfully slow and expensive compared to layer-2 networks. However, this may be about to change with the EIP-9698 – a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal put forward by the Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist. The initiative suggests a four-year, deterministic plan to scale Ethereum’s the base layer by increasing the gas limit 100 times – from 36 million to 3.6 billion. If implemented, it’d potentially boost throughput from today’s ~20 TPS to around 2,000 TPS.
Feist has shared the draft on Github, explaining the motivation behind the initiative. “The current gas limit mechanism relies on miner/operator voting, which lacks coordination and predictability. While flexible, this approach can lead to stagnation or overly cautious increases. 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,” the paper reads.
The EIP-9698 presumes rolling out two tenfold increases every approximately 164,250 epochs, roughly equalling two years. Feist acknowledges that rapid gas limit expansion may stress under-optimized nodes and increase block propagation times. Nevertheless, he argues that the gradual, epoch-by-epoch schedule gives node operators and infrastructure teams enough time to upgrade their hardware and software.
The improvement is highly anticipated. Currently, Ethereum processes roughly 20 transactions per second (TPS) during simple-transaction periods – far below rival high-throughput chains, such as Solana, which averages 800–1,050 TPS. Since its London hard fork in August 2021, Ethereum’s gas limit doubled from 15 million to 30 million, and validators approved a rise to 36 million as recently as February 2025. Still, even with layer-2 rollups, pressure on the base layer remains high during network congestion.
If approved, EIP-9698 would mark Ethereum’s first major base-layer scaling effort since London. Meanwhile, developers are advancing EIP-9678 (a four-fold gas limit lift for the Fusaka hard fork, late 2025) and preparing Pectra (May 2025) for other protocol enhancements. Together, these initiatives could reshape Ethereum’s capacity, balancing on-chain throughput with node decentralization.
