Discussion on Ethereum Transaction Confirmation Speed Improvement Solutions

With the continuous development of Ethereum, the transaction confirmation time has been shortened from several minutes a few years ago to the current 5-20 seconds. This is largely due to the implementation of EIP-1559 and Ethereum's transition to a proof-of-stake mechanism. However, to further improve the user experience, especially for application scenarios that require sub-second latency, we still need to explore more possibilities.

Overview of Existing Technology

Single Slot Finality

The current Gasper consensus mechanism used by Ethereum is based on a slot and epoch architecture. A slot occurs every 12 seconds, and validators take turns voting on the chain head. After two epochs (approximately 12.8 minutes), a transaction can reach a final confirmation state. This approach has issues of high complexity and long confirmation times.

Single-slot finality (SSF) proposes a consensus mechanism similar to Tendermint, allowing each block to be finalized before the next block is generated. However, this approach also faces the challenge of requiring all validators to publish two messages every 12 seconds, which could impose a significant burden on the network.

Rollup pre-confirmation

As Ethereum develops towards a rollup-centric roadmap, L2 solutions need to provide users with a faster transaction confirmation experience. Theoretically, L2 can establish its own decentralized sequencer network that signs blocks every few hundred milliseconds. However, this requires L2 to bear a workload almost equivalent to creating new L1, resulting in slow actual progress.

Basic Pre-confirmation

The basic pre-confirmation scheme utilizes the complexity of Ethereum proposers to create a standardized protocol. Users can obtain an immediate guarantee that their transaction will be included in the next block by paying an additional fee. If the proposer fails to fulfill their promise, they will face penalties. This mechanism is applicable not only to L1 transactions but also provides pre-confirmation services for L2.

Future Development Direction

Considering the above schemes comprehensively, we may see an epoch-slot architecture that combines single-slot finality and pre-confirmation mechanisms:

1. Achieve single-slot finality, potentially extending the slot time to 16 seconds.
2. Use technology similar to Orbit to reduce the number of validators per slot.
3. Use rollup pre-confirmation or basic pre-confirmation to provide users with faster confirmations.

The reason this architecture is difficult to avoid is that the time required to reach a general consensus on a certain matter is much less than that needed to achieve maximum "economic finality." Factors influencing this include the number of participating nodes and the "quality" of the nodes.

Development Strategy of L2

There are currently three main development strategies for L2:

1. Completely based on Ethereum, optimizing its technical attributes and values.
2. As a "server with blockchain scaffolding", fully leverage centralized efficiency.
3. Compromise solution: Establish a fast chain consisting of about a hundred nodes, while relying on Ethereum for additional interoperability and security.

Different strategies have their advantages for various application scenarios. The key in the future lies in exploring how to achieve shorter slot times within Ethereum's native epoch-and-slot architecture, as well as the complexity of block proposers.

With the continuous innovation of technology, we hope to provide a better experience for L1 and L2 users while simplifying the work of L2 developers. Ongoing exploration and optimization of these solutions will be an important driving force for the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.