Ethlabs summarizes the voices of about 20 ecosystem participants, advocating for the inclusion of EIP-8198 in the Hegotá upgrade: first, adjust the block time to be configurable, and then gradually reduce it from 12 seconds to 10 seconds.

Written by: Ethlabs

Translated 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; now is the time to act.

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

Mainnet acceleration has always been restrained: speed can be increased, but not at the expense 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 maintaining these attributes.

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

Today, Ethereum produces one block every 12 seconds. Carl Beekhuizen wrote this EIP in March this year; Barnabé Monnot submitted it to All Core Devs on August 6, aiming for inclusion in the Hegotá upgrade, with Francesco D'Amato and more clients and ecosystem teams promoting it together.

The proposal consists of two steps. First, a major refactor will remove the hard coding of "block time is always 12 seconds" from the software; then, leveraging this capability, the block time can be gradually accelerated as the network becomes prepared. The initial proposal is to reduce it from 12 seconds to 10 seconds, after which each further reduction must be tested individually and consensus reached. The core idea is not to cut to the extreme in one go, but to first allow the block time to be safely adjustable.

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

Who cares?

No one is asking for Ethereum's mainnet to become the world's fastest trading venue. But as a secure, decentralized layer that provides settlement for the global economy, it can be faster.

Faster primarily means smoother. Reduced waiting times lead to better experiences. After communicating with builders, it becomes evident that the impact goes beyond that.

Faster block times can make on-chain markets more efficient

The mainnet is already a sizable market. In the past 30 days, DEX transactions totaled approximately $41.25 billion. For comparison, Singapore's main exchange recorded about $33.9 billion in securities transactions in August 2026. If the protocol layer is made even faster, it will help position the mainnet as a more competitive global settlement layer.

The market will not wait for Ethereum to produce blocks. Between blocks, prices continue to fluctuate, demand remains in motion. With shorter slots, on-chain liquidity updates more frequently, the window for outdated quotes narrows, enabling better user transactions and improved market-making conditions.

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

Doppler, a founder focused on asset issuance and cold-start liquidity, views the same issue from an LP perspective: "Faster slots directly improve LP yields and make capital markets more efficient. Quickly implementing EIP-8198 will help maintain the network's dominance in capital formation and trading."

Josh Kim, engineering head of the options platform Derive, pointed out that waiting for an L1 transaction to complete exposes arbitrageurs to price risk, impacting their ability to rebalance the market and maintain narrow spreads. Derive V3 will be deployed on Ethereum's mainnet: "Large options orders often drive perpetual and spot activity on our DEX. The speed of block production directly affects the fees, slippage, and risk that arbitrageurs incur when they come in to rebalance. For instance, when going long on spot and shorting perpetual, they currently bear a 12-second spot settlement risk, often only daring to enter when prices fluctuate significantly."

Tokenized stocks and ETFs also benefit. Ondo uses Request for Quote (RFQ) to handle minting and redemption: prices are agreed off-chain, but users still need to transact on Ethereum. During the wait, the underlying assets continue to trade. With shorter slots, the risk borne by the quoting party decreases, providing room for tighter spreads. Ondo's ecosystem leader Armand Khatri stated, "Markets pricing tokenized stocks and ETFs never wait for Ethereum to produce blocks. From signing quotes to transaction confirmation, every second involves someone bearing price risk, which ultimately reflects in the price spread. Shorter slots narrow that window, bringing on-chain prices closer to off-chain references. This is a tangible improvement and does not consume Ethereum's attributes that make it worth settling on."

Matthew, co-founder of Ethereum Institutional, believes that heightened market perception will provide more reasons for institutions to shift their activities on-chain. PropellerHeads founder Haikane noted that trading businesses have very thin profit margins, and even slight delays can be important, potentially leading more businesses to move their assets to L1 trading.

ZoomerAnon, a contributor at Aerodrome (which is deploying instances on the mainnet), supports faster block production: "Timelier price updates mean less value leaked to arbitrageurs, resulting in more trades staying within the on-chain pool. A large transaction moving to decentralized market makers does not benefit Ethereum; this is partly caused by slow block production. We can adjust parameters and swap modules to accommodate the new block times without needing to redeploy."

Speaking from various angles, all point to one thing: shorter blocks lead to more frequent state updates, making the mainnet market more efficient. If fresher states can be provided without sacrificing decentralization, it is worth pursuing.

For users, faster means more usability

There is another category of users who simply do not want to know what a slot is. TokenWorks' FWA.fun recently became one of the largest gas-consuming applications on the mainnet, bringing back a batch of new users and some who haven't touched the mainnet for a long time. Founder Adam stated that no matter how much the front end hides the wait, users still dislike waiting; FWA uses Chainlink VRF, which requires an additional 3 block confirmations. When blocks are shorter, the entire waiting period gets shortened. Many users will buy continuously and submit transactions in a row, and every second saved counts.

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

Dan Lipert, a contributor to the privacy protocol Railgun, believes that faster block times will concentrate liquidity more on L1, leading to a larger privacy pool; compliance tools can also react more effectively during critical windows, allowing users to use various applications privately without waiting passively.

L2 has already optimized for faster interactions. The work of L1 is different: it needs to provide a settlement layer that is as secure, trust-neutral, and censorship-resistant as possible, allowing those systems to ultimately rely on it. For those wanting to bring user-facing products closer to these attributes, a faster mainnet will provide direct assistance.

Speeding up can also mean stronger censorship resistance

One important reason for placing transactions on a decentralized chain is censorship resistance. If someone refuses to package your transaction, Ethereum should quickly provide you with an alternative route.

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

For those being censored, block time equals wait time, determining how long it will take for another opportunity to be included on-chain.

This becomes even more significant when layered with Hegotá's flagship EIP—FOCIL—, which gives a set of validators (includers) additional responsibilities for transaction inclusion; Quick Slots increases the frequency of these inclusion opportunities. At 12 seconds per block, that’s 5 times per minute; at 10 seconds per block, that’s 6 times per minute. FOCIL provides more doors for censored transactions while Quick Slots allows those doors to 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 servicing the network. Patrick Apriori of Frachtis states it even more boldly: when paired with FOCIL, censorship becomes more expensive, shorter, and structurally harder to achieve.

There is a useful concept here: economic censorship resistance, which measures how much it costs an adversary to keep a transaction persistently off-chain. Shorter slots mean users have fewer waits for inclusion opportunities; adversaries must face more proposers if they want to maintain censorship during a fixed time. FOCIL incorporates includers into this process.

Performance and resilience usually conflict with each other. Quick Slots can advance both simultaneously. The layer providing settlement to the world should be both hard to censor and capable of quickly recovering when action is taken.

Speeding up does not have to sacrifice core attributes

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

Flashbots has publicly assessed this issue, and their conclusion supports this direction: shorter slots reduce confirmation delays and improve experiences; they advocate making slot times configurable and gradually testing shorter slots.

They are more concerned about geographical decentralization. As slots shorten, the available window for block production tightens, possibly disadvantaging participants who are far from network and infrastructure hubs. However, simulations calibrated by latency show that the current discussed shortening does not pose substantial constraints. Even reducing from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, regional yield disparities will increase, but the results in geographic concentration remain largely unchanged. Geographic factors serve more as an upper limit on "how much further can we press down" rather than an obstacle to the current shortening.

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

Faster L1 will also promote better collaboration among L2s

L2s relying on Ethereum inherit some interactions from L1's clock. The simplest example is deposits: assets or messages entering L2 from L1 must first have an L1 transaction included. With shorter L1 blocks, this path can be traveled earlier, regardless of whether L2 itself sorts using Ethereum.

For certain interoperability designs, the benefits are even greater. Armagan from the Ethereum Economic Zone provides an example: the EEZ is working on a solution where a contract on one rollup can call a contract on another and use its return value 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 dictates the tempo of cross-chain combinations; as slots shorten, synchronization windows open more frequently, thus reducing the worst wait until the next one. Quick Slots offer double benefits to EEZ: the first shortening makes the window noticeably denser; after making slot durations adjustable, every subsequent shortening supported by data will directly translate into faster user cross-rollup combinations."

Faster L1 enables more frequent ecological coordination. Ethlabs still sees L1's position as a global settlement layer: sufficiently secure and decentralized, enabling assets, applications, and L2s to rely on it. Quick Slots are not about making L1 so fast that L2s become unnecessary; rather, it’s about gradually speeding up the mainnet, strengthening both L1 and various L2s.

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 welcome it being classified as S-tier in Hegotá.

Guy Young, founder of Ethena: DeFi runs better with faster blocks. Ethena has built on Ethereum from day one, clearly supporting this proposal.

Noveleader, a researcher at Castle Labs, starts from market microstructure: compressing block times helps reduce rebalancing losses (LVR) for passive LPs, making on-chain pricing closer to off-chain venues, improving capital efficiency, reducing toxic arbitrage leakage, and allowing liquidation windows for lending protocols to be more timely. They also demand testing to prove that shorter slots will not raise the threshold for geographical dispersion and home validators, to avoid narrowing the propagation window and causing staking to quietly flow into better data centers; they also want to see how compressing slots affects timing games and builder competition—where shorter slots make delays and co-location advantages more valuable, block production may concentrate more. On the ecological side, contracts using block height as a clock and off-chain systems (governance cycles, time locks, models calculating interest based on annualized block counts) must have clear migration paths before activation.

Omid Malekan, a part-time professor at Columbia Business School, has a brief condition: improving block speed is better for everything as long as decentralization is preserved.

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

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; the engineering effort can be reused; the window is open now.

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

Block production time is a constraint for the entire network. Wallets can change loading animations, DEXs can alter routes, but no one can independently make the mainnet produce a next block sooner. Modifying this constraint at the protocol layer benefits all applications and users that depend on L1 delays, eliminating the need for each to find workarounds. As experiential demands rise, improving latency at the protocol layer means fewer and fewer applications will be forced to shoulder it themselves.

Engineering input will yield compound returns. A significant amount of work is required to clear the assumption of "always 12 seconds" from specifications and clients. Completing this now will make it much easier to shorten in the future, once client performance and network improve. Each shortening will still require testing, coordination, and network upgrades, but Ethereum will leave behind a reusable foundation. Capacity has already progressed under the "improve, measure, then improve" logic; latency should also follow suit.

What they are preparing

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

Current progress includes:

Specifications are becoming implementable clients. Barnabé, with the participation of Francesco and foundation contributors Justin Traglia and Jihoon Song, proposed consensus specifications covering timing changes and upgrade transitions. On September 12, Terence reported that the Prysm prototype had been implemented according to work specifications and tested locally with Kurtosis. The next step is multi-client alignment implementation, testing transitions under conditions closer to a real network.

They are checking what things are currently tied to 12 seconds. Ethlabs is working with Sourcify to examine the timing assumptions of deployed contracts and identify migration paths that may need adjustment, including contracts interacting with historic beacon block roots. Initial assessments are providing clear code paths rather than vague "it might break" statements.

They are also reviewing follow-up routes. Francesco is examining the relationship between Quick Slots and decoupled consensus with the foundation's finality team. Both directions envision there being faster block production in the future.

What’s still needed

Ethereum upgrades involve hundreds of billions in value and must ensure no downtime, with stakeholders so numerous that fitting them all in one meeting room is challenging. For an EIP to enter the mainnet, it requires proposal, specification writing, implementation, testing, identifying breaking changes, fixing them, and retesting until those responsible for delivery are confident enough to include it in an upcoming upgrade.

Quick Slots is on this path. What needs to be done next is clear: incorporate specifications into the main code, align implementations, test network conditions, check downstream dependencies, and plan the next steps for the mechanism within the crucial context of post-quantum migration. Ethlabs' work is to convert the unknowns into implementation and migration plans that qualify it to truly fall under the scope of Hegotá.

Maintaining clients, running validators, providing infrastructure, or being an application that could benefit from a speedier mainnet, they hope to hear feedback; if constraints are overlooked, they wish to hear that as well.

Decentralization and performance do not have to be an either-or; sometimes they can both be pursued together. A powerful Ethereum relies on collective action within its ecosystem. They believe it is time to make this ecosystem move a bit faster.