vitalik.eth
@VitalikButerin
Always glad to see when people appreciate the protocol changes that add hard invariants, improving protocol security and future adaptability
2021: EIP-2929 + 3529 (SLOAD gas cost increase, refunds nerfed)
2024: SELFDESTRUCT nerf (Dencun)
2025: 16,777,216 gas per tx limit
All of these put various kinds of hard caps on how much can happen within a single block or a single transaction, eliminating entire classes of DoS risk, enabling client code simplification, and creating more options for how to increase efficiency.
Invariants I expect we will want soon:
* Cap number of code bytes accessed (short term: increase cost of calling big contracts, medium term: binary tree + per-chunk pricing)
* Bounds on ZK-EVM prover cycles (repricings)
* Changes to memory pricing to create a clearer hard bound on max EVM memory consumption
@no89thkey
EIP-7825 is one of the most underrated upgrades for the future of ZK proving and 100X Ethereum scaling.
By capping each Ethereum transaction at ~16.78M gas, it removes the risk of a single “mega-transaction” consuming an entire block. That sounds small, but the implications for ZK systems are huge.
ZKVMs generate proofs by replaying execution.
Bigger single tx → bigger un-parallelizable unit of work → longer latency.
Before 7825, one "ZK unfriendly" transaction could blow up the proof time because you cannot run parallel proving across multiple transactions. This easily breaks real-time proving which is needed for 100X Ethereum scaling. For any team working on fast ZKVMs, this was the nightmare scenario.
7825 fixes that.
Now, every block is made of predictable, bounded work units, which makes proving schedulable and highly parallelizable. As long as we can prove a worst-case 16M gas tx fast enough (like <5s), we know we can prove basically any big blocks through parallel computing.
In short:
EIP-7825 made sure that Ethereum real-time proving becomes a pure money problem. As long as we can throw enough parallel computing power to the problem, we can get real-time Ethereum proving for even 100M, 200M gas blocks, TODAY.
This upgrade may not look like the main event tonight, but it is actually a massive unlock for the ZK roadmap and the future of Ethereum scaling in 2026.
Believe in somETHing.