Protocol Update 001 – Scale L1

Ethereum is making strategic progress toward scaling its Layer 1 (L1) while preserving its foundational principles of security and decentralization. This update outlines efforts to increase transaction throughput and efficiency on the mainnet, including gas limit enhancements and innovations in block processing.

Key Ideas

Ethereum is targeting a safe increase of the mainnet gas limit to 100M per block, with recent improvements already enabling a rise to 45M gas.
Initiatives like History Expiry aim to reduce node disk usage, while future upgrades such as Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) and zkEVM real-time proving promise parallel execution and dramatic performance boosts.

Why It Matters?

Applications previously limited by gas fees or latency may now be viable on mainnet, potentially simplifying tech stacks and reducing reliance on Layer 2s for basic operations. ntegrating scalable L1 capabilities may unlock new product categories and improve operational efficiency across decentralized platforms.