Ethereum
Ethereum’s Buterin Showcases Ways to Improve Transaction Speed
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has put forward 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 that “some applications” require latencies in the “hundreds of milliseconds or less.”
In a June 30 blog postthe Ethereum co-founder noted that while Ethereum has already “improved a lot compared to five years ago,” there is still “a lot of room for improvement in the user experience.” Buterin outlined several methods to improve transaction speed, including single-slot finality (SSF), which replaces the current complex slot-and-epoch architecture.
“The main challenge with SSF is that, naively, it seems to imply that every Ethereum participant would have to publish two messages every 12 seconds, which would be a significant burden for the chain to manage.”
Vitalik Buterin
Another proposal involves “based preconfirmations,” a mechanism for users to offer additional fees for immediate transaction guarantees.
The basic idea, Buterin says, is to create a “standardized protocol” in which users could offer additional fees in exchange for an “immediate guarantee that the transaction will be included in the next block.” The main feature of this approach is that this mechanism can be used for any Layer 2 solution like Optimism, Arbitrum, or Base.
In the case of Bitcoin, the expected block time is around 10 minutes, which is too long for everyday payments. However, BTC is increasingly seen as a store of value rather than a payment solution. In contrast, Ethereum is significantly faster, requiring around 12 seconds to generate a block.
Average block generation time in Ethereum (in seconds) | Source: YCharts
However, this is still too slow compared to competitors like Solana, which generates blocks in 0.4 seconds. Ultimately, Buterin acknowledges that a 12-second block time could be “sufficient” for some applications like Ethereum-based domains and some payments. However, he points out that for those looking for faster solutions, the only viable option so far is a “slot and epoch architecture.”