This article applies to:

• Ethereum
• Polygon
• BNB Smart Chain
• Avalanche
• Fantom
• Harmony

In brief

The gas parameter of eth_call and eth_estimateGas is limited to 500000000 Gwei for EVM elastic nodes.

The gas parameter limitation on EVM dedicated nodes can be customized on request.

Details

The following two functions are executed locally on an EVM node and require no actual gas:

• eth_call — executes a new message call and returns the value of the executed call.
• eth_estimateGas — returns an estimate of how much gas is necessary to allow the transaction to complete.

The purpose of eth_call and eth_estimateGas is to allow for the pre-production contract testing of real applications, various blockchain analytics, and so on.

Because these two functions are executed locally on a node, create no transaction on the blockchain, and require no gas, they are easy targets to create a denial of EVM node service at the RPC level.

To prevent the attack on a node through an RPC endpoint, the EVM nodes at Chainstack are deployed with the default rpc.gascap option set to 500000000 (or 0.5 of base currency—e.g. ether).

If you have a dedicated node, you can customize or remove the gas limitation by contacting us.