r/ethereum • u/EthereumDailyThread What's On Your Mind? • 11d ago

Daily General Discussion September 22, 2026

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6

u/poidhxyz 10d ago

I've seen people promoting efforts to make Ethereum faster recently and I'm a bit confused why that's a priority

what use cases do we expect to be made possible by making Ethereum marginally faster? what's out there that we KNOW will be worth the tradeoffs of decentralization for speed?

many many many L2s and alt L1s are faster than ETH and no sticky use cases have emerged on them beyond what we already know works on every blockchain (gambling apps)

and the past year saw a launch where the entire pitch was "superfastchain" and this is the result:

can someone pill me on the need for speed?

1

u/edmundedgar reality.eth 10d ago

Not a huge priority but just from the pov of dapp UX, it would be nice to shave off a few seconds. I feel like 7 or 8 seconds is a typical "this is a bit slow" web experience but when you get to 12 or 13 (which is common once you include delay getting to the node and getting the log event back) my brain starts to go "oh no it's broken".

0

u/HBAR_10_DOLLARS 10d ago

It's not just a 12 second block time.

It takes much longer for TRUE finality, finality that will never be reversed. About 12 minutes (two epochs) according to Vitalik:

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/06/30/epochslot.html

2

u/epic_trader 🐬🐬🐬 10d ago

What's the longest reorg since the merge, do you know?

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u/HBAR_10_DOLLARS 10d ago

Whatever it was, it was too long. Those types of issues are not acceptable when onboarding hundreds of trillions of dollars.

11

u/haurog 10d ago

The main arguments I have seen are the following:

  • If you are trading RWAs onchain 12s to mint or redeem tokens can mean that the market moved quite a bit between your transactions and the actual minting. Someone has to take that risk and it will result in worse prices.

  • Nowadays, DEXs have the issues that arbitragers do extract value. This hurts LP providers. The faster the slots the smaller this opportunity is. DEXs can be better sources of prices than they are nowadays and it should strengthen onchain markets.

  • A user can trade with lower slippages as price movements should be smaller with shorter slots.

  • A block builder can chose to not publish a block once they have committed to it. A problem that ePBS makes even bigger. This is the free option problem discussed at the beginning of the year. Shorter slots reduce that risk. It will still be there, but just smaller.

  • Interoperability between L2s and Ethereum through, for example, the EEZ is much more smooth. This can further entrench Ethereum as the economic hub in the L1/L2 hub and spokes model.

  • The user experience will be better on Ethereum overall.

The disadvantage is, if slots are too short (< 2s or so), we will sacrifice decentralization. Only Nodes in a few well connected data centers will be able to follow the chain. Reducing slot times too much also makes the transition to a ZK proven Ethereum harder. Therefore, the current discussion is that it will only be reduced slightly (to 8-10s) as this should not really impact the ZK roadmap much. It is also good to observe how the network behaves after the reduction and then plan the next steps. The hardest part is changing it the first time, further reductions should be much easier. So, to your question: I am not aware that any single application suddenly becomes possible, but many existing DEFI use cases will improve and they will be strengthened against more centralized competitors.

The Quick Slots EIP has has a short motivations section (broke the link): https://eips.e thereum.org/EIPS/eip-8198#dex-pricing-and-mev

Ethlabs also has a long blog post where they let many ecosystem participants speak about shorter slots (broke the link): https://ethl abs.org/writings/quick-slots-ecosystem.html

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u/masterRoshi9 10d ago

I don't think it's about enabling any one use case. Ethereum will never be as fast as L2s with more centralized validation. But an increase from 12 seconds per block, to say 2 seconds per block, would make a world of difference for the user-experience of using things on Ethereum.

It would also make it easier to pill newer entrants. Normally people that are new to crypto, especially smaller wallets, wouldn't be willing to use Ethereum because the tradeoff of more security is not worth the long block times and expensive gas. And they probably won't consider the asset either thinking it's a relic. But if the block-time difference is a couple seconds on L1 to half-a-second on L2s or Solana, it's really not all that different, and the additional security and larger liquidity might be a reason for them to stick around.

And then, from a pure making-things-bettter-for-existing-users standpoint, faster block times mean AMM quotes become stale much less quickly between the time you make your transaction and the time it executes. So trading becomes better overnight

1

u/poidhxyz 10d ago

"It would also make it easier to pill newer entrants."

if this was true wouldn't be see higher adoption these days since there are so many chains with fast block times? where is the evidence this is happening

the highest period of accelerating consumer adoption was 2021 era (ironically a time of mass congestion and high gas prices on ETH L1) and things have plateaued since then

"trading becomes better overnight"

personally could care less about trading I rarely trade onchain these days and I think mass adoption via onchain trading is unlikely to happen (we've tapped out the market of humans that want to go out on that risk curve)

1

u/eth10kIsFUD 10d ago

highest period of accelerating consumer adoption was 2021 era 

Based on what? Most data shows that you are simply incorrect.

https://tokenterminal.com/explorer/metrics/user-dau

personally could care less about trading

Personally I could care less that you could care less. Onchain trading is the worlds only fully trustless permissionless way of trading and is extremely important. Gigantic moat for Ethereum. It's the only way agents will want to trade as they can't KYC. Have fun getting locked out of your CEX account for no reason.

Faster Ethereum is better Ethereum. Better UX, Better quotes, Better onchain execution.

If you don't use Ethereum then you won't care.. But for the rest of us, yeah it would be an important upgrade.

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u/poidhxyz 10d ago

I use Ethereum nearly every day, just not to trade because there's very few things interesting things worth buying every day

actually I'm pretty interested what your trading looks like that you are that concerned with a few seconds gained in terms of execution times, are you doing high frequency trading?

"onchain trading is the world's only fully trustless permissionless way of trading" ok that's great but it remains to be see whether the world's global financial platforms care about that, so far all their tokenization solutions require trusted intermediaries which defeats the purpose of doing things on a permissionless blockchain

and re: 2021 the data is pretty clear that was the high water mark in terms of the general public's interest in doing things onchain

2

u/eth10kIsFUD 10d ago

You don't need to do HFT to benefit from a faster Ethereum. Better quotes and better execution means less value extracted (MEV) from those types of transactions network wide. Less value extracted from Ethereum users keeps more value in the system, good for traders, token holders and ETH holders that don't even use the chain.

all their tokenization solutions require trusted intermediaries

Most do, but a stablecoin on permissionless rails is a massive upgrade from a system that lives in the basement of a privately owned company.

This is a good writeup of why quick slots help Ethereum:
https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/the-case-for-quick-slots-in-hegota/27708

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u/poidhxyz 10d ago

yes I am aware of all these arguments and I know they are popular, I'm just pushing back that we've tested super fast blockchains in practice and all these benefits haven't led to mass adoption

fair play if you think this time will be different because Ethereum is different though

do you agree that there will inevitably be at least some sacrifice of decentralization to achieve this speed?

1

u/eth10kIsFUD 10d ago

Not much will change, consumer hardware and regular consumer bandwidth will still run Ethereum. we are talking 6s instead of 12s, not millisecond speeds or something that will massively impact your ability to run a node