According to BlockBeats, on July 1, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an article titled 'Delving into the slot-and-epoch architecture, a method to provide faster transaction confirmation times for Ethereum users'. The article stated that although transaction confirmation times on Ethereum L1 have been reduced to 5-20 seconds, comparable to credit card payment experiences, thanks to EIP-1559 and the stable block time after the merger, further reduction in latency still holds significant value, especially for applications requiring delays of a few hundred milliseconds or less.
In the paper, Buterin introduced practical options explored by Ethereum to accelerate transaction confirmation speeds, with a particular emphasis on single-slot finality (SSF) in existing technology. Currently, Ethereum's Gasper consensus mechanism adopts the slot-and-epoch architecture, but this mechanism is complex and has a long finality confirmation time (12.8 minutes). SSF, through a mechanism similar to Tendermint, finalizes blocks before the next block is generated, while retaining the 'inactive leakage' mechanism to ensure the stable operation and recovery ability of the chain. The main challenge of SSF is that it puts a heavy load on the chain, but new proposals like Orbit SSF are working to alleviate this problem. The paper also discussed 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 for a more comprehensive exploration of the design space, especially those options that have a stronger separation of concerns between these two mechanisms, to reduce transaction confirmation times and improve user experience.