Crypto: Buterin Explains 4-year Roadmap For Faster, Quantum-resistant Ethereum

“The goal is to decouple slots and finality, to allow us to reason about both separately,” explained Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has added to a newly released roadmap outlining how Ethereum plans to dramatically speed up the production of new blocks and the confirmation of transactions.

Vitalik’s comments on Thursday offered more detail on a visual public roadmap called “Strawmap” released by the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol team.

“Fast slots are off in their own lane at the top of the roadmap, and do not really seem to connect to anything,” said Buterin, noting that the rest of the roadmap is “pretty independent of the slot time.”

Slot time is the time it takes for Ethereum to produce new blocks, currently around 12 seconds. The roadmap aims to get this down to as fast as 2 seconds, so the blockchain feels more like a live, responsive system rather than something that has to be waited for.

“I expect that we’ll reduce slot time in an incremental fashion,” said Buterin, suggesting reductions following a roughly square-root-of-two formula from 12 seconds down through 8, 6, 4, and eventually as low as 2 seconds.

He also suggested that p2p improvements, or upgrades to how Ethereum nodes communicate with each other — such as sharing new blocks and data without the need to download repeated data — can greatly reduce block propagation time, “making shorter slots viable with no security tradeoffs.”

The second major improvement in the roadmap is to finality, or the point at which a transaction is mathematically guaranteed to be irreversible, which is currently around 16 minutes.

The future goal is finality between 6 and 16 seconds, achieved by replacing the current complicated confirmation system with a cleaner, simpler one that’s also quantum-resistant.

Related: Ethereum Foundation lists ‘quantum readiness,’ gas limits as 2026 priorities

Source: CoinTelegraph