Speeding Up Without Sacrificing Decentralization? Ethereum EIP-8198 Adjusts Timing Before Reducing Block Size

Written by: Ethlabs

Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

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

Ethereum has the opportunity to speed up, and 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 the faster Ethereum. Nevertheless, the Ethereum mainnet combined with L2 remains the largest DeFi ecosystem. As of September 17, 2026, approximately $58 billion is locked; since the beginning of this year, spot DEX transactions across all layers have exceeded $750 billion.

Mainnet acceleration has always been restrained: speed can be increased, but not at the expense of censorship resistance, decentralization, and trusted 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 maintaining these attributes.

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, seeking to include it in the Hegotá upgrade, with Francesco D'Amato and an increasing number of clients and ecosystem teams pushing it forward.

The proposal consists of two steps. First, a significant refactor will be conducted to remove the hardcoding of "block time is always 12 seconds" from the software; then, leveraging this capability, block production will gradually accelerate as the network is ready. The initial plan is to reduce the time 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 at once, but to allow block time to be safely adjusted.

Capacity expansion has been advanced according to this logic: the gas limit is raised according to client availability, and blob capacity can also be discussed based on data capabilities. Ethlabs believes that latency should also enjoy the same treatment.

Who Cares?

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

Faster primarily means smoother. Reduced wait times lead to a better experience. Conversations with builders reveal that the impact goes beyond this.

Faster Block Times Can Make On-Chain Markets More Efficient

The mainnet is already a significant market. In the past 30 days, DEX transactions totaled approximately $41.25 billion. In contrast, Singapore's main exchange had securities transactions of about $33.9 billion in August 2026. A slightly faster protocol layer can help make the mainnet a more competitive global settlement layer.

The market will not wait for Ethereum to produce blocks. Between blocks, prices continue to fluctuate, and demand is still changing. With shorter slots, on-chain liquidity updates more frequently, the window for outdated quotes narrows, users get better trades, and market-making conditions improve.

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

Austin Adams, founder of Doppler, which handles asset issuance and cold-start liquidity, views the same issue from an LP perspective: "Faster slots directly improve LP returns and make capital markets more efficient. Quickly implementing 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 finalize exposes arbitrageurs to price risk, affecting their ability to rebalance the market and maintain narrow spreads. Derive V3 will be deployed on the Ethereum mainnet: "Large options orders often drive perpetuals and spot on our DEX. When arbitrageurs come in to rebalance, the speed of block production directly determines the fees, slippage, and risks they bear. For example, going long on spot and short on perpetuals currently involves a 12-second settlement risk, often only allowing entry during significant price swings."

Tokenized stocks and ETFs also benefit. Ondo uses request for quote (RFQ) to handle minting and redemption: prices are signed off-chain, but users still need to transact on Ethereum. During the wait, the underlying asset is still trading. With shorter slots, the risk borne by the quoting party decreases, allowing for tighter spreads. Armand Khatri, head of Ondo's ecosystem, stated: "The market pricing tokenized stocks and ETFs never waits for Ethereum to produce blocks. From signed quotes to trade confirmations, 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 tangible improvement that does not consume the attributes that make Ethereum worthwhile for settlement."

Matthew, co-founder of Ethereum Institutional, believes that enhanced market perception will increase the reasons for institutions to migrate activities on-chain. Haikane, founder of PropellerHeads, stated that trading businesses have thin margins, and even slight improvements in latency are important, potentially encouraging more businesses to move assets to L1 trading.

ZoomerAnon, a contributor at Aerodrome (which is currently launching instances on the mainnet), supports faster block production: "Timely price updates mean less value lost to arbitrageurs, and more trades stay in the on-chain pool. A large transaction running to decentralized market makers does not align with Ethereum's interests, which is partly caused by slow block production. We can adjust parameters and modules to adapt to the new block times without redeploying."

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

For 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 highest gas-consuming applications on the mainnet, bringing back a batch of new users and some who haven't interacted with the mainnet for a long time. Founder Adam stated that no matter how much the frontend hides the wait, users still dislike waiting; FWA's use of Chainlink VRF requires an additional wait for 3 block confirmations, and with shorter blocks, the entire wait time is reduced. Many users will make consecutive purchases and transactions, and every second saved counts.

Ethlabs also has a faster Ethereum workflow called FCR, which shortens confirmation times by about 30 times, which can also fill this gap.

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

L2 has already optimized for faster interactions. L1's job is different: to provide a settlement layer that is as secure, trusted, neutral, and censorship-resistant as possible, allowing those systems to ultimately rely on it. For those looking to bring user-facing products closer to these attributes, a faster mainnet will directly help.

Speeding Up Can Also Mean Stronger Censorship Resistance

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

George Davies, engineering lead at Gattaca, which currently produces about half of Ethereum's blocks, views Quick Slots as the top priority for the next version of the consensus layer EIP: "This is the biggest experience unlock for DeFi users, while also bringing benefits in censorship resistance and finality."

For those being censored, block time equates to wait time, determining how long it takes to have another chance to get on-chain.

This becomes more meaningful when combined with Hegotá's flagship EIP—FOCIL. FOCIL gives a group of validators (includers) additional responsibilities for including transactions; Quick Slots increase the frequency of these inclusion opportunities. With a block every 12 seconds, there are 5 opportunities per minute; with a block every 10 seconds, there are 6 opportunities per minute. FOCIL provides more doors for censored transactions, while Quick Slots make those doors open more frequently.

Michael Mosier, head of Blockspace research, emphasizes the quality of inclusion: shorter slots make block space more predictable, stimulating user activity and benefiting the infrastructure of the service network. Patrick Apriori from Frachtis puts it more bluntly: paired with FOCIL, censorship will become more expensive, shorter, and structurally more difficult to execute.

Here’s a useful concept: economic censorship resistance, which refers to the cost that an adversary must incur to keep a transaction continuously blocked from the chain. Shorter slots mean users wait less for inclusion opportunities; adversaries must face more proposer opportunities to maintain censorship within a fixed timeframe. FOCIL adds includers to this process.

Performance and resilience often conflict. Quick Slots can advance both together. A layer providing settlement for the world should be difficult to censor and able to recover quickly when someone attempts to do so.

Speeding Up Without Sacrificing Core Attributes

Of course, the premise is that decentralization is not exchanged.

Flashbots has publicly evaluated 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 tighten the available time for the block production pipeline, potentially disadvantaging participants far from network and infrastructure hubs. However, simulations calibrated by latency suggest that the current discussed shortening does not constitute a substantial constraint. Even reducing from 12 seconds to 6 seconds would expand the regional yield gap, but the overall geographical concentration results would remain largely unchanged. Geographical factors seem more like an upper limit on how far it can be pushed down rather than an obstacle to this current shortening.

Ethlabs is also tracking the propagation time of nodes across the network, especially considering post-quantum migration, as well as the relationship between future consensus designs, shorter slots, and larger quantum-resistant signatures.

L1 Speeding Up Will Also Improve Coordination Between L2s

L2s relying on Ethereum inherit part of L1's clock for interactions. The simplest example is deposits: assets or messages entering L2 from L1 must first have an L1 transaction included. With shorter L1 blocks, this journey can be completed sooner, regardless of whether L2 uses Ethereum for sorting.

For some interoperability designs, the benefits are even greater. Armagan from the Ethereum Economic Zone gives an example: the scheme EEZ is working on allows a contract on one rollup to call a contract on another and use the return value in the same transaction. This synchronization window can open at most once per L1 block. A 12-second L1 clock will become part of the cross-rollup experience. "L1 slot time determines the rhythm of cross-chain combinations; shorter slots lead to more frequent synchronization windows, and the worst wait until the next one also becomes shorter. Quick Slots provide double benefits for EEZ: the first shortening significantly tightens the window; after slot duration becomes adjustable, every subsequent shortening supported by data will directly translate into faster user cross-rollup combinations."

A faster L1 allows for more frequent ecosystem coordination. Ethlabs still positions L1 as a global settlement layer: secure and decentralized enough for assets, applications, and L2s to rely on. Quick Slots are not meant to make L1 so fast that L2s become unnecessary, but to gradually speed up the mainnet, strengthening both L1 and various L2s together.

More Voices

Greg Casegamas from Lido emphasizes competitiveness. Faster slots are not critical 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 this proposal.

Noveleader, a researcher at Castle Labs, approaches from the microstructure of the market: compressing block times helps reduce passive LP's rebalancing losses (LVR), making on-chain pricing closer to off-chain venues, improving capital efficiency, reducing toxic arbitrage leakage, and making the liquidation windows of lending protocols more timely. They also demand testing to prove that shorter slots will not raise the barriers for geographically dispersed and home validators, to avoid tightening propagation windows and quietly shifting staking towards better data centers; they also want to see how compressing slots affects timing games and builder competition—shorter slots make delays and co-location advantages more valuable, potentially concentrating block production. From the ecosystem side, contracts using block height as a clock and off-chain systems (governance cycles, time locks, interest models based on annual block counts) must have clear migration paths before activation.

Omid Malekan, a part-time professor at Columbia Business School, has a short condition: faster block times are better for everything, provided decentralization is preserved.

Nicolas from the on-chain venture capital protocol Umia: faster slots will enhance the mainnet experience, and as builders, they value this highly and hope to prioritize it.

Why Push for Inclusion in Hegotá

Every upgrade has limited engineering bandwidth. Advocating for Quick Slots to be included in Hegotá can be summarized in three sentences: it benefits the network; engineering investment is reusable; the window is open now.

Waiting has a cost. Upgrades after Hegotá are 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 points out that missing Hegotá does not mean Quick Slots will automatically slide into the next fork, but may have to compete for engineering resources with larger consensus overhauls, waiting several upgrade cycles for a clean window.

Block time is a constraint for the entire network. Wallets can change loading animations, DEXs can change routing, but no one can independently make the next block of the mainnet come out sooner. Modifying this constraint at the protocol layer benefits all applications and users relying on L1 latency without each having to make adjustments. As experience demands increase, improving latency at the protocol layer means applications do not have to increasingly bear the burden themselves.

Engineering investment compounds. A lot of work involves clearing the assumption of "always 12 seconds" from specifications and clients. Completing this now will make it much easier to shorten again after client performance and the network improve. Each shortening still requires testing, coordination, and network upgrades, but Ethereum will leave behind a reusable foundation. Capacity has already been advanced by "improve, measure, and improve again"; latency should be treated the same way.

What They Are Preparing

Ethlabs places Quick Slots within a larger Fast Ethereum workflow, but like any EIP, it requires coordination across the network. The Foundation's protocol team has outlined several things they need to be more confident about: achieving consensus on specifications, implementing according to specifications, assessing downstream impacts, and compatibility with decoupled consensus.

Current progress includes:

Specifications are being turned into runnable clients. Barnabé, with the participation of Francesco and Foundation contributors Justin Traglia and Jihoon Song, has proposed consensus specifications covering timing changes and upgrade transitions. On September 12, Terence reported that the Prysm prototype has been implemented according to the working specifications and tested locally using Kurtosis. The next step is to align implementations across multiple clients and test transitions under conditions closer to real network conditions.

They are investigating what is currently tied to 12 seconds. Ethlabs is working with Sourcify to check the timing assumptions of deployed contracts and identify potential migration paths, including contracts interacting with historical beacon block roots. Preliminary assessments have provided specific code paths rather than a vague "may break."

They are also reviewing the subsequent roadmap. Francesco is examining the relationship between Quick Slots and decoupled consensus with the Foundation's finality team. Both directions envision faster blocks in the future.

What’s Missing

Ethereum upgrades involve hundreds of billions of dollars in value, and it is essential to ensure no downtime, with too many stakeholders to fit in one meeting room. For an EIP to enter the mainnet, it requires a proposal, writing specifications, implementation, testing, identifying breaking points, fixing them, and retesting until those responsible for delivery have enough confidence to include it in an upgrade.

Quick Slots are on this path. The next steps are clear: incorporate specifications into the main code, align implementations, test network conditions, check downstream dependencies, and plan the next steps for mechanisms in the critical context of post-quantum migration. Ethlabs' work is to turn the unknown into implementation and migration plans, qualifying it for true inclusion in the Hegotá scope.

Maintaining clients, running validators, and building infrastructure, or any applications that may benefit from a faster mainnet, they hope to hear feedback; if any constraints are overlooked, they would like to hear that too.

Decentralization and performance do not have to be mutually exclusive; sometimes they can be pursued together. A strong Ethereum relies on collective action from the ecosystem. They believe it is time to make this ecosystem move a little faster.

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