Governance Proposal: Giga-Level Gas Limits are Coming—Achieving Market Equilibrium and Deploying the EWM Light Client on Base

Prepare for high throughput Ethereum compute with the giga-level gas limits! In recent months, Covalent has observed the clear trend of L2s racing towards gas limits that were unfathomable just a few years ago. Base has already hit 15.01 Megagas! These limits mean Ethereum will soon process billions of gas units per second. To put this into perspective, a single Uniswap V2 swap costs 100k-150k gas in a single transaction, so giga-level gas can include over 6,000 swaps in a single block. Ethereum will soon truly offer decentralized compute that lives up to the old slogan “The World Computer”.

More transactions means more data that the Ethereum Wayback Machine needs to process and verify. Covalent proposes a set of initiatives to keep up with this trend. These updates are designed to bring delegator rewards in line with market equilibrium as the Covalent Network expands participation to the Ethereum Wayback Machine (EWM) Light Clients via Base.

Summary of Proposed Changes

Deployment Proposal and Current Emission vs. Proposed Emission (Next 5 Quarters)