Improve Ethereum Transaction Confirmation Speed: Explore New Solutions

The Ethereum network has made significant progress in the past few years, with transaction confirmation times reduced to 5-20 seconds. However, to further optimize the user experience, especially to meet the sub-second latency requirements of certain applications, we need to explore more improvement solutions.

Overview of Existing Technology

single-slot finality

Currently, the Gasper consensus mechanism used by Ethereum is based on the slot and epoch structure, with one slot every 12 seconds, and 32 slots forming one epoch. While this mechanism provides strong economic guarantees, it comes with issues of high complexity and long confirmation times.

Single Slot Finality (SSF) aims to simplify this process, similar to Tendermint consensus, where each block can achieve final confirmation before the next block is generated. However, SSF also faces the challenge of increased network load and requires further optimization.

Rollup Pre-confirmation

As Ethereum develops its rollup-centric roadmap, L2 solutions need to provide faster transaction confirmations. Theoretically, L2 can establish its own decentralized ordering network, but this process is complex and time-consuming. To address this, some experts have proposed the concept of foundational pre-confirmations, aimed at providing a shared fast pre-confirmation mechanism for all L2s.

New Architectural Concept

By combining single-slot finality and pre-confirmation technology, we can envision a new epoch-slot architecture:

• Use technology similar to Orbit to reduce the number of validators per slot.
• Extend the slot time to 16 seconds
• Use rollup pre-confirmation or basic pre-confirmation for faster user confirmation

The advantage of this architecture is that it can significantly improve transaction confirmation speed while ensuring a high level of decentralization and security.

L2 Development Strategy

For L2, there are currently three main development directions:

1. Completely based on Ethereum, optimizing foundational layer technology and values.
2. Adopting the "Blockchain Enhanced Server" model, combining centralized efficiency with decentralized security.
3. Compromise Solution: Establish a medium-sized fast chain while leveraging Ethereum for additional security.

Regardless of the chosen path, L2 needs to consider how to maximize the utilization of Ethereum's security while providing a faster transaction confirmation experience.

Future Outlook

The key to the future lies in exploring more innovative designs, such as Orbit SSF. By fully leveraging these new technologies, we hope to provide a better experience for L1 and L2 users while simplifying the L2 development process. As technology continues to advance, we look forward to seeing more solutions emerge that can meet both security and speed requirements.