Vitalik calls out: Ethereum's Gas limit will increase 5 times by 2026, but inefficient operations will be fined 5 times!

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin expects Ethereum's block gas cap to continue to grow in 2026, but will bid farewell to the past model of “averaging surges across the board” and instead move to more precise and targeted adjustments. (Synopsis: Etherscan Raid Charges!) Accidentally exposed the contradiction of data dependency in the Ethereum ecosystem) (Background supplement: Vitalik signed the “No Trust Declaration”, account abstraction how to rewrite private keys, security and on-chain experience) Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted on the X platform today (26) that he expects Ethereum's block gas cap to continue to grow in 2026, but will bid farewell to the past “comprehensive average rise” model, and instead turn to more accurate and targeted adjustments. Growth will also slow significantly to avoid overinflating the network. He specifically proposed a possible balance: increase the overall gas cap by 5 times, and simultaneously increase the cost of gas by 5 times for relatively inefficient operations. This practice of “raising the upper limit and raising the lazy tax” is equivalent to using economic incentives to force developers to abandon inefficient writing and switch to more resource-saving code design, thereby bringing more efficient transactions. At the same time, Vitalik also lists the goals that he currently believes are worth optimizing (still a personal opinion, no proposal has yet been formed): SSTORE FOR CREATING NEW STORAGE SLOTS GENERAL SSTORE (SMALL BOOST) Almost all precompiled contracts (except for those related to elliptic curves) Contracts with oversized calling code (CALL) Some complex arithmetic operations (such as MODMUL) Calldata (small boost) 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 to the achievements of the community in the past year: in 2025, without a hard fork, through validator voting, The gas cap has been successfully doubled from 30M to 60M, and the block space has doubled. Vitalik especially affirmed this experience of “community-led and gradual scaling” and stressed the need to shift from “quantitative change” to “qualitative change” in 2026, pursuing a more sustainable expansion path. What is a gas cap? Why is it important to turn it up? Ethereum's “block gas limit” is like the number of lanes on a highway that determines the maximum number of transactions that can be crammed into each block. It has now reached 60M, which means that twice as many computing resources can be processed every 12 seconds as in 2024. Raising the upper limit can directly reduce the gas unit price of ordinary transactions, increase the throughput of Layer1, make applications such as DeFi, NFT large-value airdrops, and on-chain games smoother, and also provide cheap data availability (DA) space for more rollups in the future. Related reports Ethereum price prediction: Deep oversold whales accumulate $241 million in ETH, which altcoins are about to rebound? On Ethereum's “identity crisis”: misread value BitMine released its 2025 earnings report: annual net profit of $328 million, annual dividend of $0.01, next year Q1 launch of Ethereum staking platform MAVAN (Vitalik shout: Ethereum's gas cap in 2026 will increase by 5 times, but inefficient operations will be fined 5 times! This article was first published in BlockTempo's “Dynamic Trend - The Most Influential Blockchain News Media”.