Summary of the proposal. Increase Fuse Network’s block gas limit from the current 10,000,000 to 20,000,000.
Background. Fuse Network is an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain that relies on its version of the EVM. The EVM can be thought of as an isolated virtual computer within which transactions on smart contract blockchains are executed. The EVM is run by the network’s full nodes, a subset of which are validator nodes.
The EVM’s capacity to process transactions is not infinite, and, in practice, for chains like Fuse Network it is the EVM’s transaction processing capacity that currently determines the blockchain throughput, and not the consensus speed.
All EVM chains implement a limit on the amount of computation that can go into each block added to the chain - a block gas limit. This is done to ensure that it does not become too computationally expensive for community members to run full nodes and cause excessive network centralization. The existence of a significant number of independent network full nodes is arguably the most important pillar of public blockchains’ robustness.
Currently, our chain’s block gas limit is set at 10 million, which is substantially below those of most other major EVM chains. The current block gas limits for selected chains are as follows:
Ethereum - around 30 million
BNB Chain - 99-100 million
Polygon PoS Chain - 30 million
Avalanche c-Chain - 8 million
Cronos - 20 million
Celo - 20 million
So far, having block gas limits higher than 10 million has not caused any obvious issues for the blockchains opting for them. Hence, we at the Fuse core team believe that, while figures in excess of 30 million may entail too much node concentration risk, the block gas limit on Fuse Network can safely be increased to 20 million.
Benefits for the Fuse ecosystem. Implementing FIP12 effectively doubles the transaction throughput of the Fuse Network blockchain. With the current block gas limit, Fuse Network can process almost 200 FUSE transfers per second but with FIP12 getting implemented, this figure will rise to almost 400.
Implementation details. After the discussion on this Forum, if the overall sentiment around this Proposal turns out to be positive, it will be submitted to a vote by the Fuse Network validators using the Snapshot mechanism. If the proposal passes the validator vote, it will be included in the next Fuse node software release.
FIP12 has been running on Spark (fuse testnet) for the past 3 month. There has been no apparent issues with nodes running on spark with the larger blocks.