Written by: Ethlabs

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

This article is based on interviews with around 20 DeFi founders, application developers, and infrastructure researchers.

Ethereum has the opportunity to become faster; now is the time to act.

Over the past decade, "Ethereum killers" have emerged one after another, with slogans that are almost identical: we are a faster Ethereum. Nevertheless, the Ethereum mainnet combined with L2 remains the largest DeFi ecosystem. As of September 17, 2026, approximately $58 billion is locked up; spot DEX trades across layers have surpassed $750 billion this year.

Mainnet acceleration has always been restrained: speed can improve, but not at the cost of censorship resistance, decentralization, and trust neutrality. This trade-off has made Ethereum the preferred choice for on-chain value storage. Ethlabs believes that it is now possible to enhance speed while preserving these properties.

The method is EIP-8198, also known as Quick Slots

Currently, Ethereum produces a block every 12 seconds. Carl Beekhuizen wrote this EIP in March of this year; Barnabé Monnot submitted it to All Core Devs on August 6, aiming to include it in the Hegotá upgrade, with Francesco D'Amato and an increasing number of clients and ecosystem teams pushing forward.

The proposal consists of two steps. First, a significant refactoring is required to remove the hard-coded "block time is always 12 seconds" from the software; then, leveraging this capability, block production can gradually accelerate based on network readiness. The starting plan is to reduce from 12 seconds to 10 seconds, with each subsequent reduction requiring separate testing and consensus. The core idea is not to cut to the limit all at once, but to first allow the block time to be safely adjustable.

Capacity expansion has proceeded on this logic: the gas limit increases with the client's surplus, and blob capacity can also be discussed according to data capability. Ethlabs believes that delays should also enjoy the same treatment.

Who cares?

No one is demanding that Ethereum mainnet becomes the fastest trading venue in the world. However, as a secure, decentralized layer providing settlement for the global economy, it can be faster.

Faster first means smoother. Reduced waiting time improves the experience. After communicating with builders, it becomes evident that the impact goes beyond this.

Faster block times will allow on-chain markets to be more efficient

The mainnet is already a significant market. In the past 30 days, DEX trades amounted to approximately $41.25 billion. For comparison, Singapore's main exchange had a securities volume of about $33.9 billion in August 2026. A slightly faster protocol layer will help make the mainnet a more competitive global settlement layer.

The market will not wait for Ethereum to produce a block. Between blocks, prices continue to fluctuate, and demand changes. With shorter slots, on-chain liquidity updates more frequently, the window for outdated quotes narrows, resulting in better executions for users and more favorable market making conditions.

DefiLlama founder 0xngmi remarked that faster slots can enhance the experience of real-time price aggregator LlamaSwap: "Price changes between blocks are smaller, and slippage can be set tighter."

Doppler founder Austin Adams views it from the perspective of LPs making asset issuance and cold-start liquidity: "Faster slots directly improve LP returns and make the capital market more efficient. Speeding up EIP-8198 will help the network continue to dominate capital formation and trading."

Josh Kim, engineering lead at options platform Derive, pointed out that waiting for an L1 transaction to settle forces arbitrageurs to bear price risk, which affects their ability to rebalance the market and maintain a narrow spread. Derive V3 will be deployed on the Ethereum mainnet: "Large options contracts often drive perpetuals and spot trading on our DEX. The speed of block production directly determines the fees, slippage, and risks that arbitrageurs bear when they come in to rebalance. For example, going long on spot and shorting perpetuals, they currently bear a 12-second spot settlement risk and often dare only to enter when prices move significantly."

Tokenized stocks and ETFs also benefit. Ondo uses RFQ to handle minting and redemption: prices are finalized off-chain, but users still need to trade on Ethereum. During the waiting period, the underlying asset continues to trade. With shorter slots, the risk borne by the quoting party diminishes, which creates space for tighter spreads. Ondo ecosystem lead Armand Khatri stated, "Markets pricing tokenized stocks and ETFs never wait for Ethereum to produce a block. From signing the quote to trade confirmation, every second involves someone bearing price risk, which ultimately reflects in the spread. Shorter slots narrow this window, bringing on-chain prices closer to off-chain references. This is a real improvement and does not consume Ethereum's attributes worth settling on."

Matthew, co-founder of Ethereum Institutional, believes that enhanced market perception will provide institutions more reasons to migrate activities on-chain. PropellerHeads founder Haikane commented that profits in trading businesses are extremely thin, and even slight delays matter; this might encourage more businesses to move assets to L1 trading.

Aerodrome contributor ZoomerAnon (the protocol is currently deploying instances on the mainnet) supports faster block production: more timely price updates yield less value lost to arbitrageurs, keeping more trades within on-chain pools. "A large trade running to decentralized market makers does not serve the interests of Ethereum to some extent, which is caused by slow block production. We can adjust parameters and swap modules to accommodate the new block timing without redeploying."

Different perspectives converge on the same conclusion: shorter blocks mean more frequent state updates, making the mainnet market more efficient. If fresh state can be provided without sacrificing decentralization, it is worth pursuing.

To users, faster means better usability

Another category of users simply does not want to know what a slot is. TokenWorks’ FWA.fun has recently become one of the top gas-consuming applications on the mainnet, bringing in a batch of new users, as well as many who haven't interacted with the mainnet in a while. Founder Adam states that no matter how much the frontend hides the waiting, users still dislike waiting; FWA uses Chainlink VRF which additionally requires waiting for three block confirmations. With shorter blocks, the entire waiting period becomes shorter. Many users will purchase continuously and send transactions in succession, and every saved second counts.

Ethlabs has another faster Ethereum workflow, FCR, which shortens confirmation times by about 30 times, also covering this aspect.

Railgun contributor Dan Lipert believes that faster block production will concentrate liquidity more on L1, resulting in larger privacy pools; compliance tools can also have more reaction opportunities during critical windows, allowing users to privately use various applications without waiting passively.

L2 has already optimized for faster interactions. The work of L1 is different: providing a settlement layer that is as secure, trusted, neutral, and censorship-resistant as possible, so that those systems can ultimately rely on it. For those who want to bring user-facing products closer to these attributes, increased speed on the mainnet will directly help.

Getting faster can also mean stronger censorship resistance

One significant reason people place transactions on decentralized chains is censorship resistance. If someone refuses to include your transaction, Ethereum should quickly provide you with another route.

George Davies, engineering leader at Gattaca, responsible for Titan Builder which currently produces about half of Ethereum's blocks, regards Quick Slots as the highest priority for the next consensus layer EIP: "This is the biggest experience unlocking for DeFi users while concurrently bringing benefits of censorship resistance and finality."

For those being censored, block time literally represents wait time, determining how long until another chance to get on-chain.

This overlaps meaningfully with Hegotá's marquee EIP—FOCIL. FOCIL assigns additional responsibilities for including transactions to a group of validators (includers); Quick Slots increase the frequency of these inclusion opportunities. A 12-second block produces five opportunities per minute; a 10-second block produces six. FOCIL offers more gateways for censored transactions; Quick Slots make those doors open more frequently.

Blockspace research head Michael Mosier emphasized the quality of inclusion: shorter slots make block space more predictable, stimulating user activity, and benefiting the infrastructure that serves the network. Patrick Apriori from Frachtis is bolder in his statement: paired with FOCIL, censorship will become more expensive, shorter, and structurally harder to implement.

Here’s a useful concept: economic censorship resistance, which refers to how much cost an adversary must incur to keep a transaction continuously off-chain. Shorter slots mean users wait less for inclusion opportunities; an adversary maintaining censorship within a fixed timeframe must confront more proposers' opportunities. FOCIL further contributes includers to this process.

Performance and resilience often conflict. Quick Slots can push both forward. A layer providing settlements for the world should be both hard to censor and recover quickly when action is taken.

Getting faster shouldn't cost core attributes

Of course, the precondition is that decentralization should not be compromised.

Flashbots has publicly assessed this issue, concluding that shorter slots reduce confirmation delays and improve experiences; they support making slot times configurable and gradually experimenting with shorter slots.

They are more concerned about geographical decentralization. Shorter slots and tighter timelines for the block production pipeline may disadvantage participants far from network and infrastructure hubs. However, simulations calibrated by latency indicate that the current discussed shortening is unlikely to impose substantial constraints. Even reducing from 12 seconds to 6 seconds would expand the yield gap between regions, while the results of geographical concentration remain largely unchanged. Geographical factors are more like the upper limit of "how much further can we compress," rather than an obstacle to this current shortening.

Ethlabs is also tracking the global node propagation time, especially considering post-quantum migration, and the future relationship between consensus design, shorter slots, and larger quantum-resistant signatures.

Faster L1 will improve coordination between L2s

L2s dependent on Ethereum have some interactions inheriting the timing of L1. The simplest example is deposits: assets or messages from L1 to L2 must first have an L1 transaction included. With a shorter L1 block time, this journey can be completed earlier, regardless of whether L2 uses Ethereum for sorting.

For some interoperability designs, the benefits are greater. Armagan from the Ethereum Economic Zone exemplified: the scheme EEZ is working on allows a contract on one rollup to call a contract on another rollup and utilize the return values within the same transaction. This synchronization window can open at most once per L1 block. With a 12-second L1 clock, it becomes part of the cross-rollup experience. "L1 slot time determines the rhythm of cross-chain compositions; shorter slots lead to more frequent synchronization windows, reducing the worst-case waiting time for the next opportunity. Quick Slots bring dual benefits to EEZ: the first shortening makes the window noticeably tighter; once slot durations are adjustable, each data-supported shortening will directly translate into faster user cross-rollup compositions."

A faster L1 enables the ecosystem to coordinate more frequently. Ethlabs still positions L1 as the global settlement layer: secure and decentralized enough for assets, applications, and L2s to rely on. Quick Slots are not intended to make L1 so fast that L2s become unnecessary, but to progressively speed up the mainnet, strengthening L1 and various L2s together.

More Voices

Greg Casegamas from Lido emphasized competitiveness. Faster slots are not crucial for their core staking business, but as broader Ethereum/DeFi participants, they support anything that makes Ethereum stronger and more competitive, and they are pleased to see it marked as S-level in Hegotá.

Guy Young, founder of Ethena: DeFi runs better with faster block times. Ethena has been building on Ethereum from day one and clearly supports the proposal.

Noveleader, a researcher at Castle Labs, approaches from the market microstructure perspective: compressing block times helps reduce passive LP rebalancing loss (LVR), aligning on-chain pricing closer to off-chain venues, improving capital efficiency, minimizing toxic arbitrage leakage, and allowing lending protocols' liquidation windows to be more timely. They also demand testing to demonstrate that shorter slots will not raise barriers for geographical dispersed and home validators, preventing propagation windows from tightening, and subtly directing staking towards data centers with better network conditions; they want to watch how slot compression impacts timing games and builder competition—shorter slots increase the value of delays and co-location advantages, which could centralize block production. From an ecosystem perspective, contracts that measure blocks as clocks and off-chain systems (governance cycles, time locks, models that calculate interest by annualized block counts) must have clear migration paths before activation.

Omid Malekan, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, had a concise condition: faster block production is better for everything, provided decentralization is preserved.

Nicolas from the on-chain venture capital protocol Umia commented that faster slots will enhance mainnet experience; as builders, they value this greatly and hope to prioritize its advancement.

Why push for inclusion in Hegotá

Each upgrade's engineering bandwidth is limited. Advocating for Quick Slots to be included in Hegotá can be summarized in three points: it benefits the network; engineering investments are reusable; and the window is open now.

Waiting comes at a cost. The upgrade after Hegotá is currently referred to as I*, which may include decoupled consensus: separating block production from finality is already the highest priority proposal in the Ethereum Foundation's protocol roadmap. Barnabé pointed out that missing Hegotá does not mean Quick Slots will automatically slip into the next fork; it might have to compete for engineering resources with larger consensus reforms and could wait several upgrade cycles to have a clean window.

Block time is a network-wide constraint. Wallets can change loading animations, and DEXes can alter routing, but no one can single-handedly make the next block on the mainnet come out sooner. Changes to the protocol layer that modify this constraint benefit all applications and users reliant on L1 latency without having to each find their own workaround. As experience demands continue to rise, improving latency at the protocol layer means applications won't be increasingly forced to bear it themselves.

Engineering investments yield compound returns. Much of the work involves clearing the assumption of "always 12 seconds" from specifications and clients. Completing this now will make it significantly easier to shorten block times later, once client performance and the network improve. Each shortening will still require testing, coordination, and network upgrades, but Ethereum will leave behind a reusable foundation. Capacity has already progressed following the "improve, measure, and re-improve" principle; delays should be treated similarly.

What remains to be done

Ethereum upgrades impact hundreds of billions in value and must guarantee no downtime, with a multitude of stakeholders difficult to accommodate within a meeting room. An EIP must go through proposal, specification writing, implementation, testing, identifying broken elements, fixing them, retesting, until those responsible for delivery are confident enough to include it in an upcoming upgrade.

Quick Slots are on this path. The next steps are clear: incorporating the specifications into the main code, aligning implementations, testing under network conditions, assessing downstream dependencies, and planning the next steps for mechanism within the critical post-quantum migration context. Ethlabs' work aims to convert the unknown into implementation and migration plans, qualifying it for genuine inclusion in the scope of Hegotá.

Maintaining clients, running validators, or infrastructures, or applications that might benefit from a faster mainnet, they hope to receive feedback; if constraints were overlooked, they would like to hear about that too.

Decentralization and performance do not have to be a choice; sometimes, they can coexist. A strong Ethereum relies on collaborative action within the ecosystem. They believe it is time to let this ecosystem move a little faster.

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