Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has added to a newly released roadmap outlining how Ethereum plans to accelerate the production of fresh blocks and confirmation of transactions.
Vitalik comments on Thursday, he provided more details about the visual audience action plan called “Strawmap” released by the Ethereum Foundation protocol team.
“The fast slots are at the top of the roadmap and don’t seem related to anything,” Buterin said, noting that the rest of the roadmap is “basically independent of slot time.”
Slot time is the time it takes for Ethereum to create fresh blocks, currently about 12 seconds. The action plan aims to reduce this time to two seconds to improve reaction times.
“I expect we will gradually reduce the duration of the rift,” Buterin said, suggesting a square-root reduction from two of 12 seconds to eight, six, four and eventually all the way down to two seconds.
He also suggested that p2p improvements, or improvements to the way Ethereum nodes communicate with each other – such as sharing fresh blocks and data without having to download repeated data – could significantly reduce block propagation times, “making shorter slots viable without compromising security.”
Finality from minutes to seconds
The second significant improvement to the roadmap is the achievement of finality, which is the point at which a transaction is mathematically guaranteed to be irreversible, which is currently around 16 minutes.
The future goal is to achieve finality within six to 16 seconds by replacing the current intricate confirmation system with a cleaner, simpler one that is also quantum-resistant.
Related: The Ethereum Foundation lists “quantum readiness” and gas limits as priorities for 2026
“The goal is to separate places and finalities so that we can consider them separately,” Buterin explained.
He said this is a “very invasive set of changes,” so the plan is to combine the largest step of each change with a “switch to cryptography, especially to post-quantum hash-based signatures.”
Quantum gap resistance before finality
Buterin said the consequence of this approach would be quantum-resistant rifts before a final solution.
“One of the interesting consequences of the incremental approach is that there is a way to make the gaps quantum-resistant much earlier than finally making them quantum-resistant.”
The network could “quite quickly” reach a state where, if quantum computers suddenly appear, “we lose the guarantee of finality, but the chain will continue,” he said.
“Expect a gradual reduction in slot time and end time,” Buterin concluded.
“Component-by-component replacement” of Ethereum’s slot and consensus structure will create “a cleaner, simpler, quantum-resistant, proof-friendly, end-to-end formally verified alternative.”
The timeline for these changes spans the next four years, with seven forks planned approximately every six months. The Glamsterdam and Hegotá festivals have already been confirmed and are scheduled to premiere later this year.
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