Glamsterdam devnet 8 put 200,000,000 in its gas-limit schedule. Four validator-client groups signed 200M proposer preferences. Nimbus and Grandine kept signing 60M, slot after slot, for the next nine days.
The schedule worked exactly as designed. That is the awkward part.
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.
I had been reading the gas-limit signalling table too literally.
It shows a stubborn 30M/36M tail, even though Ethereum's block headers have been sitting around 60M gas for months. I used to describe that tail as validators still signalling old limits. That was too generous. A chunk of it looks like relay-registration fossils.
When Pectra activated on May 7, 2025, it quietly did something nobody was talking about: it cut the consensus-layer overhead in every beacon block by 66%. Attestations shrank from ~35 KB to ~12 KB per block overnight. Clean. Measurable. Effective.
Two months later, the gas limit increase to 45M erased the entire saving. By November, when the limit hit 60M, blocks were 40% larger than they'd ever been.
The optimization worked perfectly. It just didn't matter.
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.