Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposes to reduce transaction confirmation time

According to BlockBeats, on July 1 Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article titled «Delving into the architecture of slots and epochs, a method that provides faster time to confirm transactions for Ethereum users». The article says that although the confirmation time of transactions in Ethereum L1 has been reduced to 5-20 seconds, comparable to credit card history, thanks to EIP-1559 and stable blocking time after the merger, further reducing the delay is still important. Especially for applications that require a few hundred milliseconds delay or less.

In the article, Buterin presented practical options explored by Ethereum to accelerate the speed of transaction confirmation, focusing on the finality of one slot (SSF) in existing technology. Currently, Gasper’s Ethereum consensus mechanism uses the «slot age» architecture, but this mechanism is complex and has a long time to confirm finality (12.8 minutes). SSF, through a mechanism similar to Tendermint, finalises the blocks before creating the next block, while maintaining the «inactive leakage» mechanism to ensure stable operation and recovery of the chain. The main problem with SSF is that it puts a lot of stress on the chain, but new proposals such as Orbit SSF are working to alleviate this problem. The paper also discusses pre-validation and pre-validation mechanisms.

Buterin stressed that the slot architecture is obviously correct, but not all slot-era architectures are the same. He advocates a more comprehensive exploration of the design space, especially those options that have a clearer division of tasks between the two mechanisms in order to reduce transaction confirmation time and improve user interaction.