It's time for a Faster Ethereum: what the ecosystem has to say about EIP-8198

Barnabé Monnot, Binji · September 17, 2026

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Ethereum has a chance to become faster, and now is the time to make it happen. We spoke with the ecosystem to uncover what they have to say about EIP-8198 (Quick Slots). This article shares what we learned across 20 voices ranging from DeFi founders and app developers to infrastructure researchers.

Many “Ethereum killers” have emerged over the past decade, and one of their primary claims has been that they are “Ethereum, but fast.” Despite this, Ethereum L1 and its L2s together remain the largest DeFi ecosystem by total value locked, with over $58 billion in TVL as of September 17, 2026, and over $750 billion in spot DEX trading volume across layers since the start of the year.

Amid this growth, Ethereum L1 has taken a deliberate approach to getting faster: speed matters, but not at the expense of the censorship resistance, decentralization, and credible neutrality that make Ethereum valuable in the first place. This approach has built major confidence in Ethereum as the preeminent place to store value onchain. And now, we believe we have a chance to strengthen these core properties while also making it faster.

Enter EIP-8198

Today, Ethereum produces a block every 12 seconds. With EIP-8198, also known as “Quick Slots,” we can start bringing that down.

@CarlBeek authored this EIP back in March and @barnabemonnot took it to Ethereum's All Core Devs on August 6th to propose it for Hegotá and has pushed it since, with input from @fradamt and a growing set of ecosystem and client teams.

There are two parts to this EIP:

1. Doing the larger, one-time refactor to remove fixed timing assumptions in Ethereum’s software.
2. Using that work to make blocks faster over time.

The proposal starts with a reduction from 12 seconds to 10 seconds, with further reductions considered individually as the network becomes ready for them. Subsequent reductions would still need to be justified through testing and agreement, but the groundwork for making them would already be there. The road to a faster Ethereum starts by making Ethereum’s block time easier to safely change, and that is the core idea behind Quick Slots.

Ethereum has already adopted this iterative philosophy for scaling capacity: gas limits have increased as the network has demonstrated more headroom, and blob capacity can be revisited as Ethereum’s data capacity improves.

We think latency deserves the same treatment.

#Who cares?

We do not believe that Ethereum L1 needs to be the fastest trading venue in the world to be valuable. However, we believe an Ethereum L1 that remains a secure and decentralized settlement layer for the world economy can get faster.

At risk of stating the obvious, a faster Ethereum is a smoother Ethereum; that much is intuitive. Less waiting time means a better UX; however, our conversations with builders across the ecosystem revealed there is far more to it.

Here are some things that we learned:

#Faster blocks can make Ethereum’s markets more efficient

Today, L1 Ethereum is already a substantial market, processing approximately $41.25 billion in DEX volume in the past 30 days alone. For comparison, Singapore’s main stock exchange recorded approximately US$33.9 billion in securities turnover in August 2026. Progressive improvements to L1 protocol speed can further strengthen this activity and let Ethereum truly become a globally competitive settlement layer for value, one that brings an increasing array of people into decentralized finance.

Markets do not wait for Ethereum blocks. Prices keep moving and demand keeps changing between one block and the next. Shorter slots let onchain liquidity update more often which reduces the window in which prices can become stale thus leading to better execution for users and better conditions for liquidity providers.

@0xngmi, Founder of @DefiLlama, explained what Quicker Slots could mean for users trading through one of its products, LlamaSwap, a swap aggregator that evaluates rates across DEXes in real-time:

“Quicker Slots would improve trading UX on swaps due to being able to set much tighter slippages, as the prices would change less between blocks.”

Austin Adams ( @aadams ), Founder of @dopplerprotocol, which focuses on asset issuance and bootstrapping liquidity on Ethereum, sees the same improvement from the perspective of liquidity providers:

“Faster slot times on Ethereum directly improves LP returns and makes capital markets more efficient. Shipping EIP-8198 as soon as possible would help ensure the network is the dominant place for capital formation and trading.”

For crypto options platform @DeriveXYZ, the benefits extend across markets. Their Head of Engineering, Josh Kim ( @josh_pwrk ), highlights how waiting for an L1 transaction exposes arbitrageurs to price risk, which affects their ability to rebalance Derive’s markets and maintain tight spreads. Note: Derive V3 will be on Ethereum L1:

“Large options trades on Derive will often move the perp and spot markets on our DEX - arbitrageurs are critical in stepping to rebalance markets. Faster block times on the L1 has a direct effect on how much fees, slippage and risk the arbitrage takes on. For example, a long spot / short perp arbitrage would require the trader to take on 12s worth of price risk while waiting for the spot transaction to settle on the L1 - forcing them to only step in during large price spikes.”

The benefits of Quick Slots also extend to tokenized stocks and ETFs. @Ondo fills mint and redeem requests through an RFQ: a price is signed offchain, then the user’s transaction has to land on Ethereum. While it waits, the underlying asset can keep trading; therefore, shorter slots reduce that exposure and give the quoting side more room to tighten spreads. Armand Khatri ( @armandkhatri ), Head of Ecosystem at Ondo, told us the following:

“For tokenized stocks and ETFs, the market that sets the price never waits for an Ethereum block. Every second between a signed quote and a confirmed transaction is price risk someone has to carry, and that risk shows up in spreads. Shorter slots narrow that window and bring on-chain prices closer to their offchain reference. That is a real improvement, and it costs Ethereum none of the properties that make it worth settling on.”

At an institutional level, @ismiMatthew, co-founder of Ethereum Institutional ( @ethereuminsti ), sees Ethereum’s market awareness as part of its growing appeal for financial institutions.

“As more institutional activity moves onchain, these improvements make Ethereum an increasingly compelling foundation for financial markets. They also reinforce confidence in Ethereum’s ability to deliver on its roadmap and keep raising the bar technically.”

@Haikane, Founder of PropellerHeads ( @PropellerSwap ), cited the rise of trading businesses on Ethereum and commented on how lowering latency can boost margins and thus allow more businesses to see L1 as a good place to port over and trade their assets.

“Trading businesses compete on extremely narrow margins, so even relatively small improvements concerning latency can matter.”

@ZoomerAnon, an Aerodrome ( @aeroxyz ) contributor, sees faster blocks as a way to improve prices for traders, reduce losses to arbitrageurs, and keep more trading activity in onchain liquidity pools. Note: Aerodrome is currently creating an instance on L1 Ethereum:

"We are definitely in favor of faster block times. Like other DEXes that host liquidity, faster block times help us get more up-to-date prices for traders and lose less value to arbitrageurs. I don't think it's in Ethereum's interest to see a big portion of transacting happen via centralized market makers, and these kinds of developments are partly a result of slow block times. Our protocol can be trivially reconfigured to accommodate faster or updated block times, via param updates + swapping out modules. We fortunately don't need to redeploy when block times change."

These teams approach the problem from different angles, but they all point to the idea that shorter blocks mean more frequent updates to Ethereum’s state, which means more efficient markets for people trading on the L1.

If Ethereum can provide fresher state without sacrificing the properties that make those markets credibly decentralized in the first place, then that is an improvement worth pursuing, as it directly supports Ethereum remaining a core hub for apps building decentralized markets and their users.

#For users, a faster Ethereum is a more usable Ethereum

One way to understand the value of this EIP is to look at users who aren’t thinking about slots at all (or at least, the kind of slots we are talking about here). FWA.fun by @token_works recently became one of Ethereum’s largest gas-consuming applications, bringing a fresh cohort of users directly onto L1, as well as many who hadn't used mainnet in a while. Adam ( @Rhynotic ), the Founder of TokenWorks, shared the perspective of a consumer app whose users experience Ethereum L1's waiting times directly.

“Faster block times would be a great help for FWA, for a few reasons: 1) Users do not like waiting, even if you try to hide the wait as much as possible on the front-end, and 2) The Chainlink VRF I use for FWA currently adds a 3-block confirmation delay, so shorter blocks would mean less of a wait overall for the system. A lot of our users try multiple purchases/transactions, so every second saved counts."

A quick note on the confirmation delay: Another part of our Faster Ethereum workstream, FCR, which reduces confirmation times by 30x, also helps fix this.

For Railgun ( @RAILGUN_Project ), the potential benefits also extend to privacy. Contributor Dan Lipert ( @dan_lipert ) sees faster blocks as a way to bring more liquidity onto L1, support larger privacy sets, and give compliance tools more opportunities to respond as users interact with applications.

“Faster Ethereum blocks mean more concentrated liquidity on the L1, and therefore more privacy through larger privacy sets. Compliance tools have more opportunities to react as well in the window that matters, leading to an overall smoother experience that allows Railgun users to privately access all of the tools and platforms they want without having to wait.”

If we can make interacting with Ethereum L1 feel faster without making Ethereum less Ethereum, then that is a better Ethereum experience for everyone who touches mainnet.

Note: Ethereum L2s are already optimized for much faster interactions, but L1 has a different job: it provides a maximally secure, credibly neutral, and censorship-resistant settlement layer that those systems can ultimately depend on. For builders like Adam and Dan who wish to build user-facing products closer to these properties, a faster Ethereum undoubtedly helps.

#Getting faster can also mean better censorship resistance

A major reason someone would want to trade on a decentralized blockchain in the first place is censorship resistance, a staple of a truly free market. If someone refuses to process your transaction, Ethereum should give you another route in as quickly as possible.

George Davies ( @_eltitan ), Head of Engineering at Gattaca (@gattacahq), a team behind Titan Builder, which builds roughly half of Ethereum’s blocks today, sees Quick Slots through exactly this lens:

“In our opinion, this is priority #1 for the next major CL EIP. I believe that it’s the single largest UX unlock for DeFi users, while also bringing CR and finality benefits with it.”

For someone being censored, block time becomes waiting time as it determines how long they wait for another opportunity to get their transaction included.

This becomes particularly interesting alongside Hegotá’s headliner EIP, FOCIL. FOCIL gives a committee of validators, known as includers, an additional role in transaction inclusion and Quick Slots increases how frequently those inclusion opportunities arrive. At 12-second blocks, Ethereum schedules five per minute; but at 10 seconds, six. Essentially, FOCIL gives a censored transaction more doors into Ethereum, and Quick Slots helps those doors appear more often.

Michael Mosier ( @mostlyblocks ), Head of Research @blockspace_eth, also highlighted the quality of transaction inclusion:

“Shorter slots should be a top priority as they increase the quality of blockspace through faster and more predictable inclusion. They will stimulate user activity, benefiting the network and the infrastructure serving it.”

Patrick Apriori ( @apriori0x ), from Frachtis VC ( @frachtisvc ), and host of the Credible Commitments Podcast (which recently featured Quick Slots!) takes the argument further:

“Quick Slots leads to improved censorship resistance, improves UX across all main-net applications and L2 bridges, and makes Ethereum more attractive as a global settlement layer for the world’s financial value. Paired with FOCIL, Quick Slots makes censorship more expensive, shorter, and structurally harder.”

This introduces another useful concept: economic censorship resistance, or how costly it is for an adversary to keep a transaction out of the chain. Shorter slots mean users wait less time for another inclusion opportunity, while an adversary attempting to sustain censorship over a fixed period must contend with more proposer opportunities. FOCIL adds additional includers into that process.

Performance and resilience usually trade off against each other, but with Quick Slots, they can move together. A settlement layer for the world should be hard to censor and quick to recover when someone tries.

#Quick Slots can make Ethereum faster without jeopardizing its core properties

Of course, faster blocks only matter if Ethereum can achieve them without compromising the decentralization that makes L1 valuable in the first place.

Burak ( @boez95 ) and his colleagues from Flashbots specifically studied this question in their public assessment of Quick Slots. Their conclusion was supportive:

“We support this direction. Shorter slots reduce confirmation latency and can enhance user experience… We therefore support making slot timing configurable and experimenting with gradually shorter slots.”

More importantly, Flashbots examined how shorter slots could affect geographical decentralization. Shorter slots tighten the time available across the block-production pipeline, potentially increasing the disadvantage faced by participants farther from major network and infrastructure hubs.

However, their latency-calibrated simulations suggest that this is unlikely to be a material constraint at the slot times currently under discussion. Even when reducing slot time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds, regional reward disparities increased while geographical-centralization outcomes remained largely unchanged.

They conclude that geography is less a constraint on the reductions being considered today than a potential limit on how far slot times can ultimately be pushed without creating additional centralization pressure.

At Ethlabs, we are also closely tracking the propagation time for all nodes on the network to better understand the effects of Quick Slots. This matters in particular as Ethereum looks toward its post-quantum migration and the relationship between future consensus designs, shorter slots, and larger PQ-ready signatures.

#A faster Ethereum L1 can make Ethereum L2s work better together

Every L2 that depends on Ethereum has interactions that inherit L1’s clock. The easiest example is deposits. Moving assets or messages from Ethereum L1 onto an L2 requires an L1 transaction to be included; shorter L1 blocks therefore mean the journey can happen sooner, whether or not the L2 itself uses Ethereum as its sequencing layer.

For some interoperability designs, the benefit goes further.

Armagan ( @epochzer0 ) from The Ethereum Economic Zone (@etheconomiczone ) gave us a concrete example. EEZ is working on designs where a contract on one rollup can call a contract on another and use the returned value within the same transaction. In this design, that synchronous opportunity opens at most once per Ethereum L1 block. That means the 12-second L1 clock can become part of a cross-rollup user experience.

“EEZ is built so a contract on one rollup can call a contract on another and use the return value in the same transaction, but that synchronous window opens at most once per L1 slot, since everything must settle within a single L1 block. That means L1 slot time sets the cadence of cross-chain composition; shorter slots directly multiply how often applications get a synchronous window and cut the worst-case wait to the next one. Quick Slots benefits EEZ twice: first, the initial reduction means synchronous windows come noticeably more often, and second, making slot duration tunable means every future reduction the data supports flows straight into faster cross-rollup composition for EEZ users.”

A faster L1 lets coordination across the Ethereum ecosystem happen more often, which points to the role we see Ethereum L1 playing: a global settlement layer that provides an exceptionally secure, decentralized foundation many assets, apps, and L2s can depend on.

A settlement layer that can better coordinate across those that settle on it becomes far more valuable to everyone involved. Quick Slots does not seek to make L1 so fast that L2s become redundant, but instead, it seeks to make Ethereum Mainnet progressively faster in ways that can make both L1 and various L2s stronger together.

#More voices from the ecosystem

The Ethereum ecosystem is vaster than our calendars are, but we hope to get even more feedback from teams, both positive and negative! Here are some more comments from industry leaders:

Greg from Lido ( @LidoFinance ) puts the emphasis on Ethereum’s broader competitiveness. Lido also ranked Quick Slots as S-tier for Hegotá:

“To be clear: faster slots aren't critical for our core staking use case specifically. But as a broader Ethereum/DeFi participant, we support anything that makes Ethereum stronger and more competitive, so we're glad to see this prioritized.”

Guy Young ( @gdog97_ ), founder of @ethena, the protocol behind USDe, adds his support for a faster Ethereum:

“DeFi runs better on faster blocks. Ethena has been building on Ethereum since day one and strongly supports this proposal.”

Noveleader ( @noveleader ), Researcher at Castle Labs ( @castle_labs ), connects faster blocks with better conditions for passive liquidity providers and more responsive lending markets:

“At Castle Labs, we support the foundation behind Quick Slots. From a market microstructure perspective, compressing the block time can help the L1 to mitigate Loss Versus Rebalancing (LVR) for passive liquidity providers. Keeping onchain asset pricing tighter to offchain venues improves capital efficiency, reduces toxic arbitrage leaks, and secures lending protocols through faster liquidation windows.

Regarding concerns, we want to ensure testing demonstrates that shorter slots do not raise the barrier to entry for geographically distributed and home validators, as tighter propagation windows could quietly push staking toward well-connected data centers. Additionally, we want to understand how compressed slots affect timing games and builder competition; when each slot is shorter, latency and colocation advantages matter more, which could further concentrate block building. On the ecosystem side, contracts and offchain systems that treat block numbers as a clock (governance periods, timelocks, blocks-per-year interest models) must have a clear mitigation path well before activation.”

Omid Malekan ( @malekanoms ), an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and long-time decentralization advocate, underlined the condition that should guide the work:

“Faster blocks are better for everything if achieved while preserving decentralization.”

Nicolas ( @merklefruit ) at Umia (@umia_finance ), an onchain venture protocol, emphasized the experience of building and using applications on mainnet:

“It's undeniable that faster slots will increase the UX on Mainnet. As builders ourselves, we value this feature a lot and would be happy if it were prioritized.”

#Why should Quick Slots be a priority for Hegotá?

Ethereum has many valuable proposals competing for finite engineering capacity in every upgrade. As with any EIP, championing Quick Slots therefore needs to be grounded in clear reasons.

In short: we believe Quick Slots benefits the network, the engineering investment is reusable, and the window to begin the work is open now.

• We believe that waiting has a cost: the upgrade after Hegotá, currently known as I*, could include decoupled consensus. This major redesign separates block production from finality and is already the highest-priority proposal in the EF Protocol roadmap. As Barnabé has pointed out, missing Hegotá does not necessarily mean Quick Slots moves into the next fork. It could instead mean competing with a much larger consensus project for engineering capacity and potentially waiting multiple upgrade cycles for another clean opportunity to do the work.
• We believe that block time is a network-wide constraint, and thus improving it is a network-wide upgrade: wallets can improve their loading screens, and DEXes can optimize their routing, but none can independently make Ethereum L1 produce its next block sooner. When the protocol improves that underlying constraint, every application and user that depends on L1 latency benefits without having to solve the same problem independently. As the need for faster experiences grows, we would rather improve latency at the protocol level where possible than increasingly ask applications to engineer around it.
• We believe that the engineering investment compounds: much of the work involves removing assumptions throughout Ethereum’s specifications and clients that block time will always be fixed at 12 seconds. Doing that work now makes future reductions easier to consider as client performance and networking improve. Every reduction would still need to earn its way through testing, coordination, and a network upgrade, but Ethereum would have a reusable foundation for getting faster. We already take this progressive approach to scaling capacity: gas limits have increased as client performance has improved, while blob capacity can be revisited as the network demonstrates additional headroom. We think latency deserves the same philosophy: improve it, measure the result, and keep improving as the network allows.

#What we’re doing to make Quick Slots ready

We have spent enough time talking about how helpful Quick Slots is, and you are probably left wondering something like: “Okay, this is great, but what are you doing to make it happen?”

While Ethlabs has Quick Slots as a core workstream under our larger Fast Ethereum umbrella, this, like any other EIP, is a network-wide coordination effort that we are lucky to be joining. The teams mentioned above, along with many others, have contributed research, implementation work, testing, feedback, and support that are helping move Quick Slots toward readiness. We look to keep bringing these arguments together to provide a well-balanced synthesis of why the network, its ecosystem, its clients, and its users may benefit from a Faster Ethereum.

However, words are not enough, and supporting Quick Slots means helping it meet a clear shipping standard; for that, we are putting our bandwidth where our mouth is.

EF Protocol teams have pinpointed key areas where they need greater confidence: an agreed specification, implementations that follow it, an assessment of downstream effects, and demonstrated compatibility with decoupled consensus.

Those are the right requirements, and our work focuses on helping answer them. Here is how we are approaching it:

1. Moving from specifications to working clients

Quick Slots is already moving into actual code. Barnabé, with input from Francesco (@fradamt), and EF contributors Justin Traglia ( @JustinTraglia ) and Jihoon Song ( @jih2nn ) have put forward a consensus specification covering the timing changes and upgrade transition.

On September 12, @terencechain also reported implementing a Prysm prototype aligned with the working specification, and successfully testing it locally with Kurtosis. Terence also released a piece on past and future protocol changes that benefit shorter slots.

The next step is to bring implementations into alignment and test the transition across multiple clients under increasingly realistic network conditions.

2. Finding what depends on twelve seconds today

We are working with @SourcifyEth to examine deployed contracts for timing assumptions and identify where migration work may be required, including contracts that interact with historical beacon-block roots.

An initial assessment has already produced concrete code paths for investigation rather than a generic concern that “something might break.” The conversations we are having with the ecosystem are part of this work too because a change that affects all of Ethereum should involve all of Ethereum.

3. Making sure this work fits what comes next

Quick Slots cannot be evaluated in isolation from Ethereum’s longer-term consensus roadmap. Francesco is working closely with the EF Finality team on the relationship between Quick Slots and decoupled consensus, the larger redesign expected after Hegotá.

Both directions contemplate a future with faster blocks, which is encouraging!

#Okay, so what is stopping this from happening?

Ethereum upgrades affect tens of billions of dollars in value, are done meticulously to ensure 100% uptime, and are coordinated across more stakeholders than can fit in one room, even a big room. In short: getting an EIP into Ethereum means proposing it, specifying it, implementing it, testing it, finding what it breaks, fixing those things, testing it again, and eventually getting enough confidence across the people responsible for shipping Ethereum to include it in an upgrade.

Quick Slots is currently moving through this process.

The remaining work is clear. As mentioned above, we are working to merge specifications with the main codebase within a couple of days, align implementations, test network conditions, investigate downstream dependencies, and plan for the future of the mechanism amid a critical post-quantum migration. Our job is to now turn as many of those unknowns as possible into implementations and migration plans to meaningfully enter Hegotá's scope.

If you maintain a client, operate validators, build infrastructure, or have an application that would benefit from a faster Ethereum for reasons we have yet to cover, we want to hear from you. And if you think we missed a constraint, we especially want to hear that too.

We do not need to choose between decentralization and performance; sometimes, we can do both. A strong Ethereum depends on an ecosystem that moves together, and we think it is time for that ecosystem to move faster.

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