PIP-60: Increase block gas limit to 36M

Polygon Improvement Proposals Canonical PIPs
1

PIP: 60
Author: Manav Darji, Sandeep Sreenath
Title: Increase block gas limit to 36M
Description: Proposes increasing block gas limit from 30M to 36M in the Polygon PoS network.
status: Draft
Type: Core
Date: 2025-02-11

Abstract

Increase maximum gas from 30M to 36M to provide greater capacity, allowing for more transactions in a single block.

Motivation

As the network continues to increase its usage, the demand for gas will increase, potentially creating a bottleneck for transaction volumes.

By increasing the gas limit by a conservative 20%, headroom is created for additional capacity to handle growing demand without significantly straining node hardware.

Specification

Validators can implement this change at the client level without requiring consensus changes. This client-based change will allow the network to uniformly implement higher gas so that individual validators do not cause bottlenecks during a particular span.

Parameter Changes:

  • Current Block Gas Limit: 30,000,000 gas
  • Proposed Block Gas Limit: 36,000,000 gas

Validators can set their block gas limit via the --miner.gaslimit 36000000 flag on their execution layer client.

Backwards Compatibility

This change is non-breaking and backward-compatible.

Security Considerations

The increased block gas limit may result in larger blocks requiring more time to propagate across the network. Testing will ensure that this change does not significantly increase uncle rates or network desynchronization.

Validators must be capable of handling the updated gas and ensure it does not exceed their CPU, memory, and disk resources.

Copyright

All copyrights and related rights in this work are waived under CCO 1.0 Universal.

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I support this change.
I couldn’t see a chart showing gas used per block (https://polygonscan.com/charts), however, looking at https://polygonscan.com/blocks shows many blocks in the 12 million to 15 million gas range, so there appears to be demand for more block space.
Increasing to 36 million block gas limit is a good conservative first move at increasing the block gas limit. I strongly expect that the block gas limit could be increased again without concern for blockchain nodes not keeping up with the chain. However, the thing to keep in mind when increasing block gas limit is that the stored state size will grow faster, making it harder to operate a node and meaning that it will take longer for a node to sync with the network.
Has there been performance testing to see how high the gas limit can be pushed given the current node software and state size?

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