Ethlabs says Ethereum can speed up without surrendering censorship resistance, decentralization, or credible neutrality. Its bet: EIP-8198, better known as Quick Slots.
That argument is built on interviews with about 20 DeFi founders, app developers, and infrastructure researchers. Their shared take is pretty blunt: Ethereum mainnet does not have to turn into the planet’s fastest trading rail. But it can cut latency and still keep the traits that made it the go-to settlement layer for onchain value. As of Sept. 17, 2026, Ethereum mainnet and its layer-2 networks still accounted for the biggest DeFi arena, with roughly $58 billion in total value locked and more than $750 billion in spot DEX volume across layers so far this year.
Quick Slots starts with timing refactors, not an immediate cut to the limit
Ethereum now produces a block every 12 seconds. Carl Beekhuizen wrote EIP-8198 in March. Barnabé Monnot brought it to All Core Devs on Aug. 6 in a push to get it into the Hegotá upgrade, and Francesco D'Amato, together with a rising number of client teams and contributors around Ethereum, has been helping drive it ahead.
The proposal comes in two parts. First, Ethereum would need a broader refactor so software stops assuming block time is permanently fixed at 12 seconds. Then, once that machinery is in place, the network could shorten slots step by step as readiness improves. The first move under discussion is from 12 seconds to 10 seconds. Any later cut would need separate testing and separate consensus. So no, this is not about smashing block times down to the minimum in one shot. It is about making slot duration adjustable without doing something reckless.
That matches the way Ethereum has handled capacity. Gas limits can go up when clients can handle it, and blob capacity can be revisited as data handling gets better. Ethlabs says latency deserves the same treatment.
Why builders say shorter slots would matter for markets
Ethlabs says the first effect is obvious: less waiting. Simple enough. But the interviews point to something wider in market structure. Ethereum mainnet already clears serious volume. Over the past 30 days, DEX volume on mainnet came in at about $41.25 billion. For comparison, securities turnover on Singapore’s main exchange was about $33.9 billion in August 2026. In that view, even a modestly faster base protocol would make mainnet a stronger global settlement venue.
Markets do not freeze between Ethereum blocks. Prices move. Demand shifts. The chain is still waiting for the next slot. If slots get shorter, onchain liquidity refreshes more often, stale quote windows shrink, users get better execution, and market making gets easier.
DefiLlama founder 0xngmi said faster slots would improve the experience for real-time quote aggregators such as LlamaSwap: "Quotes move less between blocks, so slippage settings can be tighter."
Doppler founder Austin Adams made the same case from the liquidity provider side. "Faster slots directly improve LP returns and also make capital markets more efficient. Shipping EIP-8198 quickly would help the network keep leading capital formation and trading."
Josh Kim, head of engineering at options platform Derive, said arbitrageurs take price risk while waiting for an L1 transaction to land, which affects how well they can rebalance markets and keep spreads tight. Derive V3 is set to deploy on Ethereum mainnet. Kim said: "Large options orders often move the perps and spot markets on our DEX. When arbitrageurs step in to rebalance, block speed directly determines the fees, slippage, and risk they take on. For example, if they go long spot and short perps, they currently have to absorb 12 seconds of spot settlement risk, which often means they only dare enter when price moves are already large."
Tokenized stocks and ETFs came up too. Ondo handles minting and redemption through request-for-quote flows, where pricing is signed offchain but the user transaction still settles on Ethereum. The underlying asset keeps trading while the chain waits. Armand Khatri, head of ecosystem at Ondo, said: "The market that prices tokenized stocks and ETFs never waits for Ethereum to produce a block. From the signed quote to trade confirmation, every second means someone is carrying price risk, and that ends up showing up in the spread. Shorter slots shrink that window and bring onchain pricing closer to the offchain reference. That is a real improvement, and it does not consume the properties that make Ethereum worth settling on in the first place."
Matthew, co-founder of Ethereum Institutional, said better market responsiveness would give institutions more reason to move activity onchain. And Haikane, founder of PropellerHeads, said trading businesses live on thin margins, so even small latency gains matter if they make L1 execution more viable.
Aerodrome contributor ZoomerAnon, whose protocol is opening an instance on mainnet, backed faster blocks as well. More timely price updates would leave less value for arbitrageurs and keep more trading inside onchain pools, he said. "It is not in Ethereum’s interest when a big chunk of flow gets pushed to centralized market makers, and slower block production is part of the reason. We can adapt to a new block time by changing parameters and swapping modules, without redeploying."
The thread running through all of this is pretty plain: shorter blocks mean state updates happen more often, and that makes the mainnet market work better, assuming Ethereum can pull it off without weakening decentralization.
For users, the change starts with less waiting
Some users could not care less what a slot is. They just know when a transaction feels slow. TokenWorks’ FWA.fun recently became one of the biggest gas-burning applications on mainnet, bringing in new users and drawing back others who had not touched mainnet in a long time. Founder Adam said front ends can only mask waiting up to a point, and users still hate it. FWA also uses Chainlink VRF, which adds another three block confirmations, so shorter blocks cut the whole wait. Many users buy repeatedly and send transactions one after another. Every second matters there.
Ethlabs also pointed to another fast-Ethereum workflow, FCR, which it said can reduce confirmation time by about 30x and help on the same problem.
Dan Lipert, a contributor to privacy protocol Railgun, said faster blocks could pull more liquidity onto L1 and expand privacy sets. He also said compliance tools would have more room to respond during critical windows, letting users access applications privately without sitting through as much delay.
Layer 2s have already tuned for faster interaction. L1 does a different job. It is the settlement layer systems depend on for safety, credible neutrality, and censorship resistance. Builders who want user-facing products closer to those properties would get a direct benefit if mainnet speeds up.
Backers say faster slots could also improve censorship resistance
Censorship resistance is one of the big reasons people use decentralized chains. If one actor refuses to include a transaction, Ethereum is supposed to give that user another route as quickly as possible.
George Davies, head of engineering at Gattaca, which runs Titan Builder and currently produces about half of Ethereum blocks, called Quick Slots the top priority for the next consensus-layer EIP. "This is the biggest UX unlock for DeFi users, while also bringing gains for censorship resistance and finality."
For a censored user, block time is waiting time. That is the clock that determines how long they must sit around before another shot at getting onchain.
Ethlabs says the effect matters even more when paired with Hegotá’s headline EIP, FOCIL. FOCIL gives a set of validators, called includers, added responsibility to include transactions. Quick Slots raises how often those chances come around. At 12 seconds per block, there are five chances per minute. At 10 seconds, there are six. Ethlabs frames it this way: FOCIL adds more doors for censored transactions, and Quick Slots makes those doors open more often.
Michael Mosier, head of research at Blockspace, focused on inclusion quality. Shorter slots would make blockspace more predictable, stimulate user activity, and help the infrastructure serving the network, he said. Patrick Apriori of Frachtis went further, arguing that when paired with FOCIL, censorship becomes more expensive, shorter-lived, and structurally harder to maintain.
The article also raises the idea of economic censorship resistance: how expensive it is for an adversary to keep a transaction offchain over time. If slots are shorter, users wait less for the next inclusion chance. If an adversary wants to maintain censorship over a fixed period, it has to contend with more proposer opportunities. FOCIL adds includers into that same process.
Performance and resilience usually pull in different directions. Ethlabs argues Quick Slots could push both forward at once, making Ethereum tougher to censor and faster to recover when someone tries.
The tradeoff line is clear: no speedup at the cost of decentralization
Supporters of the proposal are very clear about the condition. Faster blocks are fine only if decentralization is not what gets sacrificed.
Flashbots has evaluated the issue publicly and came out supportive of the direction. Its conclusion was that shorter slots cut confirmation latency and improve user experience, and that slot time should be configurable so the network can test shorter durations gradually.
Its bigger worry is geographic decentralization. Shorter slots compress the time available in the block production pipeline, which could put participants farther from network and infrastructure hubs at a disadvantage. But in latency-calibrated simulations, the reductions now being discussed do not seem to create a material constraint. The article says that even a move from 12 seconds to 6 seconds would widen regional revenue gaps while leaving the overall geographic concentration result broadly unchanged. Put differently, geography looks more like a cap on how far Ethereum can push slot times down over time, not a reason to block the current step.
Ethlabs said it is also tracking node propagation times across the network, especially with post-quantum migration in view and with an eye on the relationship between future consensus design, shorter slots, and larger post-quantum signatures.
A faster L1 would also help coordination across L2s
Layer-2 systems that rely on Ethereum inherit part of their timing from L1. The simplest example is deposits. Assets or messages moving from L1 into an L2 first need an L1 transaction to be included. If L1 blocks are shorter, that path finishes sooner whether or not the L2 uses Ethereum for sequencing.
For some interoperability designs, the upside is bigger. Armagan of Ethereum Economic Zone said EEZ is working on a model where a contract on one rollup can call a contract on another and use the return value in the same transaction. That synchronous window opens at most once per L1 block, so Ethereum’s 12-second clock becomes part of the cross-rollup user experience.
Armagan said: "L1 slot time sets the rhythm for cross-chain composability; when slots get shorter, synchronous windows appear more often, and the worst-case wait for the next one also gets shorter. Quick Slots is a double win for EEZ: the first reduction already makes those windows noticeably denser; once slot duration becomes adjustable, every further reduction supported by data will directly translate into faster cross-rollup composability for users."
Ethlabs still sees L1 as the global settlement layer: secure enough and decentralized enough for assets, applications, and L2s to lean on. Quick Slots is not supposed to make L2s unnecessary. It is supposed to let mainnet get faster over time so L1 and L2s get stronger together.
What other ecosystem participants are saying
Greg Casegamas of Lido stressed competitiveness. Faster slots are not critical to Lido’s core staking business, he said, but as a broader Ethereum and DeFi participant, the project supports anything that makes Ethereum stronger and more competitive, and would welcome an S-tier label for the proposal in Hegotá.
Ethena founder Guy Young was blunt: "DeFi works better with faster block production. Ethena has been building on Ethereum since day one and explicitly supports the proposal."
Noveleader, a researcher at Castle Labs, came at the issue through market microstructure. Shorter block times could reduce loss-versus-rebalancing for passive LPs, pull onchain pricing closer to offchain venues, improve capital efficiency, reduce toxic arbitrage leakage, and make liquidation windows in lending protocols more timely, he said.
But he also said testing has to prove that shorter slots do not quietly raise the bar for geographic distribution and home validators by tightening propagation windows and nudging stake toward better-connected data centers. He said the Ethereum world also needs to examine how compressed slots affect timing games and builder competition, because shorter per-slot windows make latency and colocation advantages more valuable and could concentrate block production. Contracts and offchain systems that use block height as a clock — governance cycles, timelocks, and models that accrue interest based on annualized block counts — also need a clear migration path before activation.
Omid Malekan, adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, put his condition in one sentence: faster blocks are better for everything if decentralization is preserved.
Nicolas of onchain venture protocol Umia said faster slots would improve the mainnet experience and should be prioritized from a builder’s point of view.
Why supporters want it in Hegotá
Every Ethereum upgrade has limited engineering bandwidth. The argument for putting Quick Slots into Hegotá comes down to three points in the article: it helps the network, the engineering work can be reused, and the window is open right now.
Waiting carries a cost. The upgrade after Hegotá is currently referred to as I* and may include decoupled consensus, which separates block production from finality and already sits at the top of the Ethereum Foundation protocol roadmap. Barnabé said missing Hegotá would not mean Quick Slots automatically rolls into the next fork. It could instead wind up competing with a much larger consensus overhaul for engineering resources and then wait through several upgrade cycles before another clean opening appears.
Block time is a network-wide constraint. Wallets can tweak loading animations and DEXs can change routing, but none of them can make the next mainnet block arrive sooner by themselves. A protocol-layer change would help every app and every user that depends on L1 latency all at once, instead of forcing each team to work around the same limit on its own.
Ethlabs also says the engineering work compounds over time. A big part of the effort is removing the assumption in specs and clients that Ethereum is stuck forever on a 12-second clock. Once that is done, future reductions get easier as client performance and network conditions improve. Each reduction would still need testing, coordination, and a network upgrade. No shortcuts. But Ethereum would keep the reusable base. Capacity has already advanced through a cycle of improve, measure, and improve again. Ethlabs says latency should follow that same route.
What has been done so far
Ethlabs places Quick Slots inside a broader Fast Ethereum workflow, but like any EIP, it needs network-wide coordination. The Ethereum Foundation protocol team has listed the areas where it still wants more confidence: an agreed specification, implementations that match it, downstream impact analysis, and compatibility with decoupled consensus.
Progress so far includes:
- The specification is being turned into running clients. Barnabé, with Francesco and Ethereum Foundation contributors Justin Traglia and Jihoon Song, proposed a consensus spec covering timing changes and upgrade transitions. On Sept. 12, Terence reported that a Prysm prototype had been implemented against the working spec and tested locally with Kurtosis. The next step is to align multiple client implementations and test the transition under conditions closer to a real network.
- Teams are checking what is currently tied to the 12-second assumption. Ethlabs and Sourcify are reviewing timing assumptions in deployed contracts and identifying migration paths, including contracts that interact with historical beacon block roots. The article says the initial assessment has already produced concrete code paths, not some vague warning that things might break.
- They are also trying to line up the roadmap with later consensus work. Francesco is reviewing the relationship between Quick Slots and decoupled consensus with the Foundation’s finality team, since both directions assume faster block production in the future.
What still needs to happen
Ethereum upgrades touch hundreds of billions of dollars in value and have to ship without downtime. The stakeholder set is far too big to fit into one room. For an EIP to reach mainnet, it has to be proposed, specified, implemented, tested, checked for breakage, fixed, and tested again until the people responsible for delivery are confident enough to include it in an upgrade.
Quick Slots is moving through that process now. The work left is pretty clear: merge the specification into main code, align implementations, test under network conditions, inspect downstream dependencies, and plan the next mechanism steps in the context of post-quantum migration. Ethlabs says its job is to turn unknowns into implementations and migration plans so the proposal can legitimately enter Hegotá scope.
The group is asking for feedback from client maintainers, validators, infrastructure operators, and application teams that would benefit if mainnet gets faster. And if there are constraints they missed, they want to hear those too.
The article closes on a simple claim: decentralization and performance do not always have to be traded against each other. Sometimes Ethereum can ask for both. And right now, the network may be at a point where it should move a bit faster.