Base throughput is constrained by gas limits, data availability throughput, fee market parameters, and endpoint limits. There is no single transactions-per-second value that applies to every workload, because transactions consume different amounts of gas and data.
Base has sustained multiple bursts of over 5,000 TPS, and throughput continues to increase as the chain scales. For more context, see Introducing Base Azul.
Current limits
| Limit | Value |
|---|
| Full block gas budget | ~400M gas |
| First Flashblock gas budget | ~40M gas |
| Per-transaction gas maximum | 16,777,216 gas (2^24) |
| Deposit transaction limit | Maximum gas includable in an L1 block (20,000,000 gas) |
| Metric | Value |
|---|
| Flashblock build time (P50) | ~10ms |
| Preconfirmation latency | ~200ms |
| Full block time | 2 seconds |
| Flashblocks per block | 10 |
| Reorg rate | < 0.1% |
Per-transaction gas maximum
As of the Azul hardfork, Base enforces a protocol-level per-transaction gas maximum of 16,777,216 gas (2^24) via EIP-7825. Transactions that specify a gas limit above this value are rejected during block validation. eth_sendTransaction or eth_sendRawTransaction will return a JSON-RPC error (for example: exceeds maximum per-transaction gas limit).
Deposit transactions are exempt from this cap. They are limited by the maximum gas includable in an L1 block (20,000,000 gas).
Fee parameters
Fees affect practical throughput because they determine whether transactions can be included when demand approaches available capacity.
| Parameter | Current value |
|---|
| Minimum base fee | 5,000,000 wei (0.005 gwei) |
| EIP-1559 elasticity | 6 |
| EIP-1559 denominator | 125 |
| Maximum L2 base fee change per block | 4% |
Data availability throughput
Base transaction data is posted to Ethereum for data availability. If data availability throughput becomes constrained, the sequencer can limit L2 transaction throughput while the batcher catches up.
During DA throttling, even transactions with high priority fees may be delayed. There is no RPC endpoint that calculates priority fee estimates with throttling in mind. See Troubleshooting Transactions for the transaction-submission implications.
Endpoint limits
Public endpoints are rate-limited and are not suitable for production traffic. Hosted RPC providers can also apply request-per-second limits, compute-unit limits, method restrictions, archive-data limits, or WebSocket subscription limits.
Endpoint limits do not change Base protocol capacity, but they can become the practical bottleneck for apps, wallets, indexers, and monitoring systems. For production use, connect through a node provider or run a Base node. 
