EIP-7781, a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) introduced on October 5 by Illyriad Games co-founder Ben Adams, could significantly increase Ethereum’s transaction throughput by reducing the network’s slot time from 12 seconds to 9 seconds. The proposed changes aim to increase transaction throughput by approximately 33%.
The motivation behind the proposal is to better distribute bandwidth usage over time, lowering the maximum bandwidth requirement. By relaxing bandwidth requirements, Ethereum can maintain greater efficiency and reduce stress on node operators, especially those with limited bandwidth capacity. According to Adams, these adjustments are designed to improve throughput without compromising the network’s accessibility.
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“Reducing Ethereum’s slot time from 12 seconds to 9 seconds can reduce rollup latency and increase transaction throughput by approximately 33% without increasing the number of individual blocks or blobs,” Adams said in an official proposal on GitHub. This distributes bandwidth usage over time, lowering peak bandwidth requirements while maintaining network efficiency.”
The implementation of EIP-7781 depends on two other EIPs: EIP-7623 and EIP-7778. These proposals are important to ensure the stability of the network under increased block production rates. This is designed to mitigate potential negative impacts from reduced slot times, such as increased orphan rates or network instability.
EIP-7781 aims to balance throughput and network accessibility by maintaining node efficiency without overburdening the system. This is particularly important for maintaining Ethereum’s decentralized spirit, ensuring that even participants with less sophisticated infrastructure can continue to run nodes.
Justin Drake, a prominent Ethereum Foundation researcher, weighed in, expressing cautious support for the proposal. In the comments, Drake said: “My initial reaction was to support reducing the slot time to 8 seconds for several reasons. This increases throughput by 1/2, effectively increasing it to a 45M gas limit and a 9 blob limit. This is roughly consistent with the 40 million gas limit proposed by Pumpthegas.org and the 8 blob limit proposed by Vitalik et al.”
Drake also spoke about the benefits of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), saying that these changes would make DEXes like Uniswap v3 “roughly 1.22x more efficient,” potentially generating about 1.22x more efficient per year in centralized exchange (CEX)-DEX arbitrage. They said it would save $100 million.
But Drake also mentioned possible downsides. “One downside to reducing slot times is that timing games become slightly more sensitive because the slot to ping ratio is reduced. Assuming your ping time is 80ms and your slot time is 9 seconds, your slot to ping ratio will still be good.”
Adam Cochran, partner at CEHV, expressed support but added a word of caution, especially for smaller stakers. He wrote to X: “Honestly, this also seems reasonable in terms of bandwidth for a solo staker with the per-block gas limit remaining the same. I’d like to see some testing on I/O hardware and staker return ping times to make sure some home stakers aren’t blocked, but I think it should be within range for most.”
But not all voices in the community are completely optimistic. Pseudonymous researcher 0xSmit raised concerns about existing smart contracts that rely on block times of 12 seconds. According to him, “many contracts have one year’s worth hard-coded in blocks, based on a block time of 12 seconds. “This could cause problems if this passes, especially for contracts without an upgrade mechanism.”
At press time, ETH was trading at $2,463.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com