According to PANews, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has been contemplating the Ethereum transaction confirmation method. The main network's transaction confirmation time of 5-20 seconds is already close to the speed of credit card transactions, which seems sufficient from a user perception standpoint. However, compared to the millisecond-level confirmation time of layer2, there is a certain security risk in the transaction confirmation difference between the main network and layer2. Therefore, optimizing the main network transaction confirmation time is more of a consideration to cater to the development strategy of layer2.
Ethereum's current Gasper consensus mechanism adopts the core concepts of Slot and Epoch. Each Slot lasts 12 seconds, during which a group of Validators are selected to verify the current transaction status of the chain and vote. Every 32 Slots, which is 6.4 minutes, constitutes an Epoch, during which all Validators complete their voting. Transaction finality usually takes two Epochs, or 12.8 minutes, meaning a transaction becomes irreversible 12.8 minutes after it is initiated.
Buterin believes this time is too long and has expressed dissatisfaction with the current Gasper consensus mechanism. He proposed a Single-slot finality improvement method, which can ensure that each block completes finality confirmation before the next block is generated, thereby speeding up the finality confirmation time. However, finality confirmation and transaction confirmation are two different things. This is not greatly related to the user-perceived 5-20 second transaction confirmation, but it becomes a significant issue when applied to the layer2 network.
This is because the time for layer2 users to submit and confirm transactions will be shorter, not only better than the user-perceived time of 5-20 seconds, but possibly reaching millisecond levels. This is due to the pre-transaction confirmation mechanism adopted by layer2 as a whole. However, if the transaction finality confirmation time of the layer1 main network is too long, there will theoretically be some time difference risks on layer2. For example, users may confirm quickly on L1 and take subsequent actions, but may suffer financial losses due to the delay in L1 status confirmation. Moreover, since layer2 itself has certain centralization risks, the longer the time difference, the more potential unknown risks of centralization chaos.
Therefore, in my view, Buterin's new article on optimizing the Ethereum main network transaction confirmation time is to some extent to cater to the major strategy of jointly promoting the layer2 system and layer1 system. Although some people in the market are pessimistic about layer2, layer2 has undoubtedly become a direction that Ethereum must consolidate in its development process.
It is clear that Ethereum's future will definitely be a 'layered' strategic advancement, relying on layer1 to focus on security and decentralization, and layer2 to provide a stable and reliable interaction settlement environment will be the trend. Buterin's proposal to accelerate transaction confirmation is essentially to reduce the layer friction between layer1 and layer2, giving users a better front-end interaction environment in layer2 and a safer back-end settlement foundation.