Ethereum is poised for a potential speed boost in early January, driven by a planned increase to the network's gas limit. The anticipated second blob parameter-only (BPO) hard fork is expected to raise the gas limit from 60 million to 80 million.

Christine Kim, the vice president of research at Galaxy Digital, reported the news, highlighting the confidence expressed by Nethermind developers Ben Adams and Kamil Chodala during a recent Ethereum All Core Developers call. They indicated that testing should be completed before the next BPO hard fork, scheduled for January 7. This hard fork aims to increase blob capacity on the Ethereum mainnet by 66%, following a similar increase implemented with the first BPO hard fork on December 9.

Ethereum Foundation developer operations engineer Barnabas Busa noted that two client-level optimizations are necessary before another increase in the block gas limit: partial blob responses on the execution layer and the max blobs flag on the consensus layer.

Blobs are large data chunks that store transaction and rollup data off-chain, which helps to lower gas costs and increase scalability without overburdening the network. Optimizing blob capacity to raise the gas limit directly increases the number of transactions and smart contract operations that can fit in each Ethereum block. This enhancement boosts overall throughput and has the potential to lower transaction fees.

While an increase to 80 million gas won't enable Ethereum to match the speed and low costs of layer 1 blockchains like Solana or Sui, it will reinforce Ethereum's position as a secure settlement and execution layer. Crucially, this improvement is expected to occur without significantly compromising decentralization, which is considered a key advantage for Ethereum.

The Ethereum developers are expected to confirm plans early in the new year. Participants in the weekly Ethereum All Core Developers meetup will reconvene on January 5 to confirm when to raise the gas limit following the second BPO hard fork. Increasing Ethereum's gas limit has been a priority, with the community pushing for higher gas limits to improve network scalability and efficiency.

In Ethereum, "gas" refers to the unit of computational energy required to perform an action, such as a transaction or smart contract execution. The gas limit sets a cap on the total amount of computational work that can be included in a single block. A higher gas limit allows for more transactions to be added to each block, potentially improving speed and reducing network fees during periods of high traffic. Validators can implement these changes by adjusting their node configurations, often without requiring a hard fork.