Vitalik Buterin suggests ways to speed up Ethereum transaction confirmations

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has suggested ways to help the blockchain improve its transaction confirmation times.

Buterin, in a June 30 blog post, explained that Ethereum’s Gasper consensus mechanism uses a slot-and-epoch architecture that contains certain complexities, like bug interactions and a 12.8-minute confirmation time, that makes it “more and more uncomfortable” for user experiences.

So, he highlighted some of the “practical options” Ethereum has to improve its user experience further.

SSF

Buterin stated that the single-slot finality (SSF) mechanism is similar to the Tendermint consensus, as it allows the finalization of blocks as soon as they are produced.

However, unlike the Tendermint consensus, Ethereum will keep the “inactivity leak” mechanism to allow chains to remain functional even if a third of the validators go offline. Buterin added that the single-slot finality mechanism also has its faults. Notably, all Ethereum stakers must publish two messages every 12 seconds, overloading the chain.

Meanwhile, Buterin furthered that while there are ideas to mitigate this issue, users may still have to wait 5-20 seconds. He wrote:

“There are clever ideas for how to mitigate this, including the very recent Orbit SSF proposal. But even still, while this improves UX significantly by making ‘finality’ come faster, it doesn’t change the fact that users need to wait 5-20 seconds.”

Rollup preconfirmations

Rollup preconfirmations aim to improve Ethereum’s Layer 2 (L2) solutions. These solutions process transactions with the same security as the Ethereum base layer (L1) but on a larger scale.

Rollups confirm transactions much faster than the current 5-20 seconds, targeting latencies of hundreds of milliseconds. This method divides responsibilities — the L1 network remains stable, censorship-resistant, and reliable, while the L2s offer faster transaction times and address user needs directly.

To achieve faster confirmations, L2s create…