The Ethereum ecosystem has received plans to reduce the irreversible confirmation time for transactions from the current approximately 16 seconds to approximately 13 seconds. This strategy was published on May 11th of this year as the first in a series of four articles by Ben Edgington, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and coordinator of a team dedicated to accelerating this process.
The purpose of Ethereum is Guarantee that transactions cannot be canceled or changed. According to Edgington’s article, achieving this requires completing two rounds of voting among the network’s validators, a process that takes 12 to 16 minutes under normal conditions.
There is a period of time until the latest block is updated before this happens. Technically vulnerable to reorganization: Replaced with alternative strings that may change the order or validity of the included transactions.
At any given time, between 63 and 95 blocks remain unfinished, Edgington said. Although it is very difficult to force a malicious reorganization of that queue, the existence of that queue forces exchanges, layer 2 (L2) networks, and cross-chain transport protocols. To implement alternative solutions that add complexity and cost.
For example, the developer explains that centralized exchanges typically wait for a certain number of block confirmations before depositing a deposit, rather than waiting for full completion. The L2 network recognizes the deposit after just a few blocks. This means that disruptions in Ethereum can cause disruptions in those chains.
Voting segregation: the change that makes everything else possible
The central obstacle Edgington identifies is that validator voting is currently unfulfilled. Two different functions within the same structure.
on the one hand, They vote for the block they think is the correct beginning of the chain (the mechanism that allows the network to advance block by block). On the other hand, you vote on checkpoints that lead to your goal. Both votes move together in what is called in the protocol. certification (voting structure), and their combination forces the finality process to be tied to the timing and limits of the block construction mechanism.
Proposed solution is to completely separate both types of voting. Cycle and process independently. According to the article, this decoupling is what allows for change, and once finality voting operates on its own channel and its own bandwidth, it allows for gradual optimization without impacting the rest of the protocol.
Edgington estimates that decoupling alone can reduce finality time by several minutes, but its main value is that it opens the door to further improvements, which together can achieve the goal of accelerating finality by a factor of 100.
Once the votes are separated, the plan considers a set of independent optimizations that can be deployed in a fork (forkAccording to Edgington, it is a continuum.
Unresolved tensions: speed and variety
Edgington warns that accelerating finality without reducing validator diversity could favor larger operators with better infrastructure, making it difficult for stakers with fewer resources or in regions with limited connectivity to participate. It finally affected the decentralization of Ethereum.
The authors state that their personal goal is to achieve acceleration goals without excluding these participants, but recognize that at some point the community may have to choose between increased speed and increased diversity.
What comes next: Gramsterdam and this plan
Voting decoupling is a strong candidate for an Ethereum I* fork. Edgington has set this as an ambitious goal for 2027. This change is not part of Gramsterdam, the next Ethereum upgrade scheduled for mid-2026.
As reported by CriptoNoticias, Gramsterdam focuses on the following improvements, among other things: Triple your network processing power Native proposer and builder separation (ePBSEnglish acronym), is a block-level access list and data creation cost adjustment. Finality mechanisms are outside its scope.
Finally, Edgington notes that his article is not an official roadmap; Technical issues remain unresolved before implementing changes such as post-quantum compatibility of the new consensus mechanism and redesign of the per-block voting process.
(Tag Translation) Blockchain
