Vitalik shouted: Ethereum’s gas limit will increase by 5 times in 2026, but inefficient operations will be fined 5 times!

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin predicts that Ethereum’s block gas limit will continue to grow in 2026, but it will bid farewell to the past “comprehensive average surge” model and shift to more precise and targeted adjustments.
(Preliminary summary: Etherscan surprise charges! Accidentally exposed the data dependence contradiction of the Ethereum ecosystem)
(Background supplement: Vitalik signed the "No Trust Declaration", how account abstraction rewrites private keys, security and on-chain experience)

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform today (26th) that he expected the block gas of Ethereum in 2026 The upper limit will continue to grow, but it will bid farewell to the past "comprehensive average surge" model, and will shift to more precise and targeted adjustments, and the growth rate will also slow down significantly to avoid excessive expansion of network burden.

He specifically proposed a possible balancing plan: increase the overall gas limit by 5 times, and simultaneously increase the gas cost by 5 times for operations with relatively low processing efficiency. This approach of "increasing the upper limit also increases the lazy tax" is equivalent to using economic incentives to force developers to abandon inefficient writing methods and turn to more resource-saving code design, thereby bringing more effective transactions.

At the same time, Vitalik also listed the goals that he currently thinks are worthy of optimization (still personal opinions, no proposals have yet been formed):

• Create SSTORE of new storage slots
• General SSTORE (slight improvement)
• Almost all precompiled contracts (except those related to elliptic curves)
• Call contracts with excessively large code (CALL)
• Some complex arithmetic operations (such as MODMUL)
• Calldata (small increase)

Expect continued growth but more targeted / less uniform growth for next year.

eg. one possible future is: 5x gas limit increase together with 5x gas cost increase for operations that are relatively inefficient to process

Potential targets for such increases (my current view):… https://t.co/FkiTxJnEAq

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 26, 2025

It is worth mentioning that this post is actually Vitalik’s official response and outlook on the community’s achievements in the past year: in 2025, without a hard fork, through validator voting, the gas limit has been successfully doubled from 30M to 60M, and the block space has doubled. Vitalik particularly affirmed this experience of "community-led, progressive expansion" and emphasized that in 2026, it will shift from "quantitative change" to "qualitative change" and pursue a more sustainable expansion path.

What is the gas limit? Why is it important to turn it up?

Ethereum’s “block gas limit” (block gas limit) is like the number of lanes on a highway, which determines the maximum number of transactions that can be filled in each block. It has now reached 60M, which means that the computing resources that can be processed every 12 seconds are twice that of 2024. Raising the upper limit can directly reduce the gas unit price of ordinary transactions, increase Layer1 throughput, and make applications such as DeFi, NFT large-amount airdrops, and on-chain games smoother. It also provides cheap data availability (DA) space for more rollups in the future.