Ethereum researchers have introduced EIP-8453, a proposal aimed at modifying the network's consensus mechanism. The primary goal is to reduce the finalization time for transactions from the current 16 minutes to approximately four minutes.
The current Gasper consensus mechanism requires two full rounds of voting for a block to become final. The proposal suggests decoupling the block selection process from the finalization process, allowing finalization votes to follow an independent schedule.
This change is expected to benefit cross-chain bridges and payment services by freeing up capital more quickly. Currently, these services often use their own reserves to provide near-instant transfers, waiting for finalization to recover funds.
Implementing these changes will require a hard fork of the consensus layer. The proposal also notes that this separation could simplify the future integration of post-quantum cryptographic signatures.
Despite the proposed improvements, Ethereum's finalization time would remain significantly slower than that of Solana, which recently updated its network to achieve a finalization time of approximately 150 milliseconds.
