Ethereum's move from a 45 million to 60 million gas limit looked like a coordinated step from a distance. At block grain it was a fight. Across the 7,866 canonical blocks in the network-level ramp, 3,958 took the maximum legal step up and 3,714 took the maximum legal step down.
That is 97.5% of blocks pulling the limit as hard as the protocol allowed, one way or the other.
When Ethereum transitioned to proof-of-stake in 2022, the combination of EIP-1559 burning and reduced issuance made the supply actually deflationary during periods of high activity. You'd see charts showing ETH supply shrinking, treasury posts celebrating "ultrasound money," and a widespread assumption that high network usage would keep issuance in check.
That assumption is dead. The data from the last four months makes it clear.
There are 842,000 transactions sitting in the Ethereum mempool right now that have been there for more than 24 hours. Most people assume they're stuck because gas fees went up. That's wrong.
69% of them — 582,000 transactions — are mathematically impossible to include. Not "too expensive to bother with," but literally incapable of being mined at any point in the future at their current pricing.
And inside that group, there's a quieter disaster: 9,436 wallets are in a nonce death lock, where one underpriced transaction from days ago has frozen every subsequent transaction the address ever tried to send.
Ethereum's gas fees are close to zero. Everyone knows that. What's less obvious is what the collapse did to where the fees go — and what it means for EIP-1559's core promise.
In January 2025, for every ETH a user paid in gas, roughly 82% was burned and 18% went to validators as tips. Today it's the opposite: roughly 89% goes to validators and 11% is burned. The ratio didn't shift gradually. It inverted in a single month.
Ethereum's base fee is so low right now — bouncing between 0.025 and 0.97 gwei — that something unexpected has emerged in the mempool: a class of transactions that aren't too cheap to ever be included. They're just cheap enough to wait.
At 0.027 gwei, the median time to inclusion is 2.6 hours. At 0.030 gwei, it's 57 seconds. Three thousandths of a gwei separate an hour of waiting from near-instant inclusion — and whether you wait depends almost entirely on what time UTC it is when you submitted.
Ethereum's block gas limit doubled in 2025. Not through a hard fork. Not through a governance vote. Through three coordinated waves of validators updating their configuration files.
The limit went from 30 million to 60 million gas—a 100% increase in block capacity—between February and November 2025. Each wave moved faster than the last. The final surge, from 45M to 60M, took just 22 hours.