Ethereum researchers want to reduce the wait for a transaction to reach finality from about 16 minutes to around four minutes. The proposal, filed as a draft by Edgington, Francesco D’Amato, Roberto Saltini, Yann Vonlanthen and Mikhail Kalinin, targets a fourfold improvement.
The change would lower costs for services that move money between blockchains. Such services often front funds on the destination chain and wait to be repaid once the original transaction settles on Ethereum. With a 16-minute delay, a service handling $1 million an hour would have roughly $267,000 tied up at any moment. At four minutes, that figure drops to about $67,000.
Stablecoin issuers such as Circle already charge for speed. Circle’s fast route on Ethereum costs 0.01 percent ($1 per $10,000) before other fees, while its standard route carries no Circle transfer fee. Circle also caps the total value of fast transfers waiting on final settlement.
The current 16-minute wait stems from how validators vote. Each validator casts one vote that both selects the next block and locks older blocks into finality. The proposal splits those tasks into separate votes, letting the finality clock run faster and allowing further speed increases in the future. The split would also make it easier to eventually switch to quantum resistant signatures.
Four minutes would still be far slower than Solana, whose recent Alpenglow upgrade achieved finality in about 150 milliseconds. Edgington wrote that “many aspects remain TBD” and that the immediate aim was getting a proposal number, the formal first step in Ethereum’s upgrade pipeline.