ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has unveiled new proposals aimed at reducing transaction confirmation times, suggesting significant improvements to the system.
ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined new strategies to reduce transaction confirmation times on the ethereum network, saying “there are some applications” that require latencies on the order of “hundreds of milliseconds or even less.”
June 30th eth.limo/general/2024/06/30/epochslot.html?data=7238940crypto88973news7387478″ target=”_blank” rel=””>blog entryThe ethereum co-founder noted that while ethereum has already “improved a lot compared to five years ago,” there is still “value in further improving the user experience.” Buterin outlined several methods to improve transaction speeds, including single-slot finality (SSF), which replaces the current complex slot-and-epoch architecture.
“The main challenge with SSF is that it naively seems to imply that each ethereum staker would need to publish two messages every 12 seconds, which would be a huge burden for the chain to handle.”
Vitalik Buterin
Another proposal involves “pre-confirmations,” a mechanism that allows users to offer additional fees for guarantees of immediate transactions.
The basic idea, says Buterin, is to create a “standardized protocol” where users can offer additional fees in exchange for an “immediate guarantee that the transaction will be included in the next block.” The key feature of this approach is that this mechanism can be used for any layer 2 solution such as Optimism, Arbitrum or Base.
In bitcoin, the expected block time is around 10 minutes, which is too long for everyday payments. However, btc is increasingly being labelled as a store of value rather than a payment solution. In contrast, ethereum is significantly faster, requiring around 12 seconds to generate a block.
However, this is still too slow compared to rivals like Solana, which generates blocks in 0.4 seconds. Ultimately, Buterin acknowledges that a 12-second block time could be “sufficient” for certain applications like ethereum-based domains and some payments. However, he notes that for those looking for faster solutions, the only viable option so far is a “slots and epochs architecture.”
