When Vitalik Buterin speaks, the industry tends to listen.

And this time, he's talking up a 10x increase in Ethereum's gas limit.

If the recent 20% bump to 36M was bullish, then this potential move could make Ethereum great… or at least usable, again. 

The Master Plan

The situation is interesting – even with L2s popping off everywhere, Vitalik thinks Ethereum's base layer needs more juice to make it worth the squeeze for your average person.

We're not talking about small tweaks either - Vitalik wants to supercharge the network by cranking the gas limit up by a factor of ten.

And before you say, "but what about L2s?" - that's exactly Vitalik’s point.

Think about it like this: what happens when an L2 goes rogue or gets too censorship-happy?

You need somewhere to run, and that somewhere is good old L1.

Plus, trying to move your weird NFTs between L2s right now, you’ll need a lot more than luck with those gas fees.

The Good(?) Stuff

This isn't so much about making transactions cheaper (which it is) as it is about making sure you can escape a sketchy L2 without selling your kidney for gas.

Honestly, being able to launch tokens on the Ethereum mainnet without needing a small fortune to pay for gas would be pretty sweet.

After all, if BlackRock can do it, what about the rest of us?

But like most things in the world of Ethereum, it’s easier said than done.

You can’t just crank up the gas limit by flipping a switch – you've got validators sweating about hardware requirements, and at the end of the day, they’re the ones that keep the network chugging along.

And the decentralization maxis are already pretty upset about node sizes – this move will only make things worse by further upping requirements and subsequently centralizing the network. 

Where We Go From Here

Vitalik might once again be playing 4D chess here while everyone else is playing checkers.

He might be thinking just as much about scaling as he is about building a proper safety net for the whole ecosystem – if nobody can afford to use it other than BlackRock, then we just rebuilt banks with extra steps.

This move is about making sure Ethereum stays Ethereum, even as the L2 ecosystem spreads like wildfire atop it. 

If it all works out, this could be the move that keeps Ethereum king of the hill – but even if it doesn’t, one thing's for sure: Vitalik's not letting L2s have all the fun.

Just don't expect this to happen overnight - even giga-brain proposals need time to cook, and upgrades like this tend to move at the speed of… well, Ethereum.