Ethereum Proposes Reducing Transaction Finality from 16 Minutes to 4 Minutes, Potentially Lowering Inter-Chain Transfer Costs

Key Points of This Article

• Separation of block selection and finality voting
• Design is incomplete, and implementation timing is undecided

Proposal to Shorten Finality

On the 21st, Ethereum researchers submitted a draft proposal to reduce the average time until a transaction is considered "final" (finality) from approximately 16 minutes to about 4 minutes. However, the design is incomplete, and the timing for implementation has not been determined.

The background of this proposal is that transfer companies moving funds to L2 chains provide customers with funds upfront and receive repayment after the transaction is finalized.

The Ethereum Foundation's research considers the funds waiting for repayment as a cost for the companies, and for those that continue to prepay $1 million per hour, a delay of about 16 minutes results in approximately $267,000 waiting for repayment.

Thus, the current proposal is to separate the "selection of the next block" and the "finalization of past blocks" into distinct votes, which are currently combined into one vote by the network's validators. Since the voting for finalization can operate on a dedicated cycle, if it can be shortened to about 4 minutes, the waiting repayment for the same companies would decrease to about $67,000.

Other Aims and Uncertain Points

The proposal suggests that separating the votes could also lay the groundwork for transitioning to a signature method that can withstand attacks from quantum computers in the future, although the selection of the signature method itself is not included. Additionally, it aims to enhance resistance to methods where attackers keep votes hidden and later reveal them to influence block selection.

On the other hand, the draft leaves some aspects of the voting cycle, penalties, and safety analysis uncertain.

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