[Vitalik publishes an article to explore ways to provide Ethereum users with faster transaction confirmation times] Golden Finance reported that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article titled "In-depth slot-and-epoch architecture to provide Ethereum users with faster transaction confirmation times". The article states that although compared with five years ago, thanks to EIP-1559 and the merged stable block time, the transaction confirmation time on Ethereum L1 has been shortened to 5-20 seconds, which is comparable to the credit card payment experience, further reducing delays is still of great value, especially for those applications that require hundreds of milliseconds or even less delay. In the paper, Buterin introduced the practical options explored by Ethereum to speed up transaction confirmation, focusing on single-slot finality in existing technologies. Currently, Ethereum's Gasper consensus mechanism uses a slot-and-epoch architecture, but this mechanism is complex and the finality confirmation time is too long (12.8 minutes). SSF uses a mechanism similar to Tendermint to terminate the block before the next block is generated, while retaining the inactivity leakage mechanism to ensure the stable operation and recovery ability of the chain. The main challenge of SSF is that it will bring a large load to the chain, but new proposals such as Orbit SSF are working to alleviate this problem. In addition, the paper also explores rollup pre-confirmation and pre-confirmation-based mechanisms. Buterin emphasized that the slot-and-epoch architecture is obviously correct, but not all slot-and-epoch architectures are equal. He advocates a more comprehensive exploration of the design space, especially those options with a stronger separation of concerns between the two mechanisms, in order to reduce transaction confirmation time and improve user experience.