Author: Sam Kessler, CoinDesk; Translated by: Deng Tong, Golden Finance
summary
The new Ethereum Improvement Proposal, formally known as EIP-7781, would increase throughput by 50%.
The proposal from Illyriad Games co-founder Ben Adams follows earlier proposals from ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others to improve the blockchain’s overall processing power.
Ethereum has faced growing criticism for failing to scale its main blockchain as it has focused in recent years on promoting the popularity of subsidiary Layer 2 networks optimized for higher transaction execution.
Disadvantages include that validators may need additional resources to support higher throughput.
A new upgrade proposal for Ethereum could increase the network’s throughput by 50%, bolstering its ability to compete with speed-focused blockchains like Solana.
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP), originally proposed by Illyriad Games co-founder Ben Adams on Oct. 5, would reduce slot times from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, enabling the network to process more transactions over time.
The upgrade, formally known as EIP-7781, will also improve the blockchain’s ability to handle blobs, which are specialized data repositories used by affiliated layer 2 networks to store transaction records. The change will effectively increase the number of blobs per block from six to nine, giving layer 2 chains like Arbitrum and Optimism more room to post data to Ethereum.
In Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, a slot is a specific time interval during which a block can be proposed. Each slot selects a validator to propose a block, and if successful, the block is added to the blockchain.
The upgrade proposal needs to go through ethereum’s open-source development system, but it has already won over some key supporters.
Vitalik Buterin’s Proposal
Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, pointed out on Github that reducing the block time to 8 seconds will make decentralized exchange (DEX) platforms such as Uniswap 1.22 times more efficient. Drake said the change could help narrow the price gap between on-chain and off-chain trading venues, saving users up to $100 million per year.
The Ethereum blockchain is lauded for having strong security and a high degree of decentralization relative to most other blockchains, but its benefits have historically come at the cost of relatively high fees and slow speeds — at least compared to newer blockchains like Solana.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed in January to increase the blockchain’s “gas limit” — the total size of transactions that can be squeezed into each block — as a way to improve overall network throughput.
EIP-7781 amounts to “effectively raising the gas limit to 45M and the blob limit to 9,” which, according to Drake, “is roughly in line with the 40M gas limit proposed by pumpthegas.org and the 8 blob limit proposed by Vitalik et al.”
Over the past few years, upgrades to the Ethereum blockchain have primarily focused on paving the way for the development of third-party layer 2 “rollup” networks such as Arbitrum and Optimism. These independent blockchain networks formally settle transactions on Ethereum’s ledger, but they offer users higher speeds and lower fees and have quickly become the primary venue for users to interact with the Ethereum ecosystem.
In March, Ethereum added data blobs to allow the blockchain to keep arbitrary bits of data in a separate, dedicated space that is cheaper than regular block space on the network. Compared to regular transactions, blobs are better suited for layer 2 networks, which bundle large numbers of transactions together and publish them to Ethereum all at once.
EIP-7781 could help layer 2 networks post data on-chain faster (and cheaper) by increasing the number of blobs, but it’s also the first upgrade in some time that’s directly focused on increasing the underlying speed of the Ethereum blockchain.
Reducing slot times from 12 seconds to 8 seconds will directly translate into faster transactions for end users, but it may increase pressure on validators, who may require additional hardware resources.
