The ethereum community is evaluating ethereum/EIPs/pull/8931″>ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 7781whose objective is to increase network performance by reducing slot time.
On October 5, Ben Adams, co-founder of Illyriad Games, presented a proposal to reduce ethereum's slot time from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, which would increase transaction throughput by approximately 33%.
This change would distribute bandwidth usage more evenly, reducing peak bandwidth needs without increasing the number of data blobs.
Adams clarified that the adjustment would produce a similar effect to increasing the number of blobs from 6 to 8 or increasing the gas limit from 30 million to 40 million. However, it avoids increasing peak bandwidth demands.
One more ethereum research bot x.com/ethresearchbot/status/1842397313915920488?t=Rx_ZSE1tC8JZ4HNpCfs4pA&s=19″>explained that reducing slot time would improve cumulative latency and throughput without burdening network bandwidth. This keeps the ethereum network accessible to participants with different bandwidth capabilities.
Meanwhile, the proposal calls for a combination of EIP-7623 and EIP-7778 to ensure network stability and higher blocking rate efficiency.
Early community support
ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has supported the proposal on GitHub, noting that it aligns with ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's broader scaling goals.
Drake also noted that the change would make decentralized exchanges like Uniswap v3 “1.22 times more efficient.” He estimated this could save users around $100 million a year in centralized-to-decentralized exchange arbitrage.
Pseudonymous developer Cygaar x.com/0xCygaar/status/1842985189124997362″>called EIP 7781 is an important step towards improving the base layer of ethereum.
According to Cygaar, this is especially notable as much of developer focus has shifted to ethereum Layer 2 networks as scaling solutions.
However, the developer admitted that the EIP still needs to do so,
“Make sure hardware requirements don't increase dramatically for individual validators and you have to find a good solution for increased state growth.”
Similarly, Matthew Sigel, head of digital research at VanEck, x.com/matthew_sigel/status/1843031729361355201?t=cxh3mPF9JE2ln8RSNsYpww&s=19″>fixed that the proposal would return some power to ethereum's Layer 1. Sigel also noted that the suggested changes could indicate an even greater speedup, with Layer 1 and 2 networks seeing a 50% performance increase.
