Vitalik Buterin continued to advocate for shortening block times on Ethereum at the EthCC conference

At the EthCC[7] conference taking place in Belgium, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin continued to emphasize the importance of shortening the block validation time of this blockchain.

In a discussion session on Pre-Confirmations (the "Provisional Confirmation" model), Vitalik Buterin mentioned the benefits of validating Slots (concept equivalent to Block - block) in a shorter time.

First EthCC coverage of the week at Sequencing x CAKE Day hosted by @EspressoSys and @FrontierDotTech

Faster Slot Times by @VitalikButerin

In his presentation, Vitalik considers the tradeoffs of decreasing block times in Ethereum for quicker transaction finality. Let's take a… pic.twitter.com/clXDWQ55Xb— The Rollup (@therollupco) July 7, 2024

Specifically, this founder believes that the soft authentication model (Pre-confirmations) of Layer-2 is a great development step for the Ethereum ecosystem in general, as it takes about 1 second for authentication. Purely on Ethereum (pre-EIP-1559 upgrade) can even take 10-13 minutes.

Although there has been a change in speed, the soft authentication model on Layer-2 will still reveal limitations. Therefore, Vitalik Buterin said there is a need for other approaches so that users do not have to trade off with other aspects (namely decentralization).

Besides, Vitalik also started an approach called "Medium-strength Assurance" instead of "Finality". Although in terms of security, Finality will be slightly better, the first approach is a combination and "temporary trade-off" to be able to deploy faster transaction confirmation, with an acceptable level of security. Okay.

Approaches to help users have shorter Confirmation times include:

An independent provisional authentication system on Layer-2

Temporary authentication structure through Proposer at Layer-1

Shorten slot time under Layer-1

To summarize: there are 3 strategies to get users shorter confirmations.

- independent L2 preconfs

- L1-organized preconfs

- L1 slots being natively faster

A lot of thought and strategic needs to be given to how we consider these and put them in practice

— Espresso Systems (@EspressoSys) July 7, 2024

With the first two approaches, founder Vitalik Buterin both pointed out different limitations. With Layer-2, the workload will be large and it will take a long time to actually deploy an optimal Pre-confirmations model. Meanwhile, assigning the Confirmation role to Proposers will increase dependence on this component, while increasing the possibility of transactions being censored and affecting the decentralization of the network.

Because of these barriers, Vitalik believes that Layer-1 needs to have a shorter Slot authentication time, thereby taking on part of the speed burden that Layer-2 must handle. Even if Slot confirmation time is shorter, less decentralized Layer-2 models can be eliminated, because at this time, the pressure on transaction confirmation time will be redistributed to Layer-1 .

This is not the first time Vitalik has spoken out in favor of implementing a "Single-slot Finality" model to shorten Authentication times on Ethereum. Also last week, the founder introduced the "slot-and-epoch" model and proposed spreading speed pressure between Layers in the network.

It can be seen that many Layer-2 criticisms about security risks forced Ethereum developers to quickly deploy new solutions to ensure secure authentication at higher speeds while still ensure decentralization.