A new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP), EIP-7781, presented on October 5 by Ben Adams, co-founder of Illyriad Games, could significantly increase Ethereum’s transaction throughput by reducing the network’s slot time by 12 seconds to 9 seconds. The proposed change aims to increase transaction throughput by approximately 33%.
The motivation behind this proposal is to better distribute bandwidth usage over time, thereby reducing peak bandwidth requirements. By smoothing bandwidth requirements, Ethereum could maintain greater efficiency and reduce stress on node operators, especially those with limited bandwidth capacity. According to Adams, this adjustment aims to improve throughput without compromising network accessibility.
Is the Ethereum improvement proposal feasible?
In his official proposal on GitHub, Adams explained: “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 blocks or of individual blobs. This would spread bandwidth usage over time, reducing 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 crucial to guarantee the stability of the network in a context of increasing block production rates. They are designed to mitigate potential negative effects of slot reduction, such as increased orphan rates or network instability.
EIP-7781 aims to create a balance between network throughput and accessibility by maintaining node efficiency without overloading the system. This is particularly important for maintaining Ethereum’s decentralized philosophy, ensuring that even participants with less sophisticated infrastructure can continue to run nodes.
Prominent Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake weighed in on the proposal, expressing cautious support. In a comment, Drake said: “My first reaction would be to support reducing slot times to 8 seconds for several reasons: it increases throughput by 1/2, an effective increase at a 45 million gas limit and a 9 blob limit. This roughly matches the 40 million gas limit proposed by Pumpthegas.org and the 8 blob limit proposed by Vitalik and others. »
Drake also highlighted the benefits for decentralized exchanges (DEXs), stating that the change would make DEXs like Uniswap v3 “approximately 1.22 times more efficient”, potentially saving around $100 million in centralized exchange arbitrage (CEX)-DEX per year.
However, Drake also mentioned a possible downside: “One of the downsides to reducing slot times is that it will make timing plays slightly sharper due to the decreased slot to ping ratio. Assuming a ping time of 80ms and a slot time of 9s, the slot/ping ratio would still be healthy.
Adam Cochran, partner at CEHV, expressed support but added a caution, particularly for smaller investors. He wrote on I’d like to see some testing of the I/O hardware and return ping times of the stakers to make sure this doesn’t cut off some local stakers, but it seems like this should be within range for most.
However, not all voices within the community are entirely optimistic. Pseudonymous researcher 0xSmit raised concerns about existing smart contracts that rely on a 12-second block time. According to him, “many contracts have hard-coded a year’s worth into blocks based on 12-second block times. This could break things if adopted, especially for contracts without upgrade mechanisms.
At press time, ETH was trading at $2,463.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
