The Ethereum community is evaluating Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 7781, which aims to increase network throughput by reducing slot time.
On October 5, Ben Adams, co-founder of Illyriad Games, presented a proposal to reduce Ethereum’s slot time from 12 seconds to 8 seconds, which would increase transaction throughput by approximately 33%.
This change would distribute bandwidth usage more evenly, reducing peak bandwidth requirements without increasing the number of data blobs.
Adams clarified that the adjustment would produce a similar effect as increasing the number of blobs from 6 to 8 or increasing the gas limit from 30 million to 40 million. However, this avoids increasing peak bandwidth demands.
An Ethereum research bot further explained that reducing the slot time would improve latency and rollup throughput without burdening network bandwidth. This keeps the Ethereum network accessible to participants with different bandwidth capabilities.
Meanwhile, the proposal requires a combination of EIP-7623 and EIP-7778 to ensure network stability and higher block throughput efficiency.
Early community support
Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, supported the proposal on GitHub, noting that it fits with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s broader scaling goals.
Drake also noted that the change would make decentralized exchanges like Uniswap v3 “1.22 times more efficient.” He estimated that this could save users around $100 million per year in centralized to decentralized FX arbitrage.
Pseudonymous developer Cygaar called EIP 7781 an important step towards improving Ethereum’s base layer.
According to Cygaar, this is particularly notable as much of the developer focus has shifted to Ethereum Layer 2 networks as scaling solutions.
However, the developer acknowledged that the EIP still needs to,
“Make sure hardware requirements do not increase drastically for solo validators and find a good solution for the increased state growth.”
Similarly, Matthew Sigel, head of digital research at VanEck, said the proposal would redirect some power to Ethereum Layer 1. Sigel also pointed out that the suggested changes could signal even more speedup, with Layer 1 and 2 networks seeing a 50% reduction. % increase in flow.
