Ethereum Institutional backs plan to cut block times to 10 seconds

Ethereum Institutional has backed a proposal to cut Ethereum's 12 second block time as developers consider bringing the first reduction to 10 seconds through the Hegotá upgrade.

Summary

• Ethereum Institutional backed EIP 8198 as developers consider cutting block times from 12 seconds to 10 seconds.
• Ethlabs said feedback from 20 DeFi founders showed broad support for Quick Slots and its potential inclusion in Hegotá.
• EIP 8198 remains under consideration, with further implementation work and testing required before inclusion in the upgrade.
• Solana and Zcash are pursuing their own block or slot time reductions as networks work to speed up confirmations.

Ethereum Institutional said Friday that Ethereum needs to become faster as more financial activity moves onto public blockchains, throwing its support behind Ethlabs' work on EIP 8198, known as Quick Slots.

"Make Ethereum faster," the nonprofit wrote on X, arguing that shorter block times are becoming more important as "more institutional activity moves onchain."

EIP 8198 would make Ethereum's slot duration configurable, allowing developers to gradually shorten the time between blocks instead of committing the network to a large reduction at once. Ethlabs is initially pushing for a move from 12 seconds to 10 seconds, with further reductions possible after developers assess network performance.

Support from Ethereum Institutional follows feedback gathered by Ethlabs from 20 decentralized finance founders. The research group said Thursday that the responses showed broad support for Quick Slots and its potential inclusion in Hegotá.

Ethereum block time proposal moves toward Hegotá

EIP 8198 was authored in March and formally proposed for Hegotá during an Ethereum core developer meeting on Aug. 6.

Ethlabs has since begun merging the proposal's specifications into Ethereum's main codebase while examining dependencies that could affect implementation. The group said the work is intended to help Quick Slots "meaningfully enter Hegotá's scope."

Hegotá is Ethereum's planned upgrade following Glamsterdam. Ethereum developers have been sorting through proposals for the upgrade, covering block production, account abstraction, privacy, validator economics and Layer 1 scaling.

As crypto.news previously reported, Ethlabs placed Quick Slots among its priorities for Hegotá alongside censorship resistance, native account abstraction and continued Layer 1 scaling.

At the time, EIP 8198 used eight seconds as a placeholder slot duration, while Ethlabs said Ethereum could initially reach 10 second slots through Hegotá. The exact timing remains subject to testing and agreement among Ethereum client teams.

Quick Slots has not been confirmed for Hegotá. Ethereum developers were still narrowing the upgrade scope in August, when FOCIL remained the only proposal formally scheduled for inclusion and EIP 8198 was still under consideration.

Reducing slot duration would increase how frequently Ethereum can produce blocks. Under the existing design, Ethereum uses 32 slots per epoch, meaning a shorter slot time could reduce the duration of each epoch if the number of slots remains unchanged.

Institutional Ethereum activity drives support

Ethereum Institutional's backing brings an institutional adoption group into the debate over Ethereum's execution speed.

The organization launched in July as an independent nonprofit focused on helping banks, asset managers, custodians, fintech companies, market infrastructure providers and sovereign institutions use Ethereum and its Layer 2 ecosystem.

BitMine Immersion Technologies, SharpLink and Ethereum co founder Joe Lubin were among the contributors supporting the organization at launch. Its work covers institutional education, market intelligence, standards, technical requirements and events.

Ethereum Institutional said at the time that Ethereum hosted around $180 billion in stablecoins on mainnet, representing roughly 60% of total stablecoin supply, along with around two thirds of tokenized real world assets.

Institutional use has continued developing alongside Ethereum's technical roadmap. Ethereum researchers this week reported sub one second propagation for a simulated 1 MiB execution payload under EIP 8411, compared with roughly five seconds when the same payload was transmitted as a single message.

EIP 8411 takes a separate approach from Quick Slots. The draft networking proposal divides execution payloads into smaller chunks that nodes can verify and forward before receiving the entire payload. Tests involved 500 simulated nodes and prototype client code, meaning the results were not measurements from Ethereum mainnet.

Glamsterdam comes before Hegotá

Ethereum developers are currently focused on Glamsterdam, the network upgrade scheduled ahead of Hegotá.

Glamsterdam is designed to increase Layer 1 capacity and change parts of Ethereum's block construction process. Developers confirmed this week that the upgrade is set to activate on Sepolia on Oct. 6, following testing on private development networks.

Devnet 11 completed its Glamsterdam transition while raising its gas limit from 60 million to 200 million for testing. The network used 84,000 validators across multiple clients, although developers excluded deliberate attacks from the test and kept adversarial experiments on the longer running Platåberget environment.

Client teams have been asked to release Sepolia ready software by Sept. 29. Developers have not confirmed a mainnet activation date for Glamsterdam, while earlier discussions have considered a possible December rollout.

Hegotá development would follow Glamsterdam, leaving EIP 8198 subject to further testing and decisions by Ethereum's core development teams before any shorter slot configuration could reach mainnet.

Rival networks are already cutting block times

Ethereum's discussion comes as other Layer 1 networks pursue shorter block or slot intervals.

Solana reduced its target slot time from 300 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds on Sept. 18, increasing targeted slot production from roughly 3.3 to four slots per second. The latest Solana speed upgrade forms the third stage of SIMD 0525, which started from a 400 millisecond target and is intended to eventually reach 200 milliseconds.

The nearly 17% reduction does not produce a corresponding increase in Solana's overall transaction capacity because computation and data limits are reduced proportionally as slots become shorter.

Solana began the staged rollout in August by cutting slots to 350 milliseconds before moving through the 300 millisecond and 250 millisecond stages. Each reduction uses a separate feature activation so developers and validators can assess network behavior before advancing to the next setting.

At 250 milliseconds, a validator's four slot leader window has fallen to one second from 1.2 seconds under the previous configuration. Solana has not set a mainnet date for the final reduction to 200 milliseconds.

Zcash is considering a similar change on a different scale. A majority of ZEC holders this week backed reducing the network's target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds as part of discussions surrounding its NU7 upgrade.

Ethereum's EIP 8198 remains a draft proposal, with its initial 10 second target dependent on further implementation work, testing and approval before it can become part of Hegotá.