Ethereum Research Draft Aims to Reduce Transaction Finality to 4 Minutes

Huo Xing Finance reports that on October 22, Ben Edgington, lead coordinator of Ethereum’s fast finality research, along with several researchers, submitted a draft proposing to reduce the transaction finality wait time from approximately 16 minutes to about 4 minutes—an improvement of roughly fourfold. The current goal is to advance this draft into the formal upgrade proposal process. The core idea of the draft is to decouple the previously combined mechanisms of “block selection” and “finality justification,” enabling finality to proceed at a faster pace and facilitating future adoption of quantum-resistant signatures. Faster finality is expected to reduce costs associated with capital lock-up in cross-chain transfer services. For example, the Ethereum Foundation’s research estimates that if a service advances approximately $1 million per hour, the outstanding amount awaiting recovery would be about $267,000 under a 16-minute delay, but would drop to approximately $67,000 under a 4-minute delay.