Ethereum Institutional has backed a proposal to cut Ethereum’s 12 second block time, as developers consider bringing the first reduction to 10 seconds through the Hegotá upgrade.
Ethereum Institutional, the nonprofit focused on bringing banks and asset managers onto Ethereum, said Friday that Ethereum needs to become faster as more institutional activity moves onchain, throwing its support behind Ethlabs’ work on EIP 8198, known as Quick Slots.
How Quick Slots would work
EIP 8198 would make Ethereum’s slot duration configurable, allowing developers to gradually shorten the time between blocks instead of committing the network to a large reduction at once. Ethlabs is initially pushing for a move from 12 seconds to 10 seconds, with further reductions possible after developers assess network performance.
The proposal was authored in March and formally proposed for Hegotá during an Ethereum core developer meeting on August 6. Ethlabs has since begun merging the proposal’s specifications into Ethereum’s main codebase while examining dependencies that could affect implementation. The group said the work is intended to help Quick Slots meaningfully enter Hegotá’s scope.
Reducing slot duration would increase how frequently Ethereum can produce blocks. Under the existing design, Ethereum uses 32 slots per epoch, meaning a shorter slot time could reduce the duration of each epoch if the number of slots remains unchanged.
DeFi founders and institutions line up behind speed
Support from Ethereum Institutional follows feedback gathered by Ethlabs from 20 decentralized finance founders. The research group said the responses showed broad support for Quick Slots and its potential inclusion in Hegotá.
Ethereum Institutional launched in July as an independent nonprofit focused on helping banks, asset managers, custodians, fintech companies, market infrastructure providers and sovereign institutions use Ethereum and its Layer 2 ecosystem. BitMine Immersion Technologies, SharpLink and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin were among the contributors supporting the organization at launch. Its work covers institutional education, market intelligence, standards, technical requirements and events.
At launch, the organization noted that Ethereum hosted around 180 billion USD in stablecoins on mainnet, representing roughly 60 percent of total stablecoin supply, along with around two thirds of tokenized real world assets. That concentration of institutional value is the core argument for faster finality: trading and settlement infrastructure built on public blockchains competes with traditional systems that confirm transactions in fractions of a second.
Not confirmed yet for Hegotá
Quick Slots has not been confirmed for Hegotá. Ethereum developers were still narrowing the upgrade scope in August, when FOCIL remained the only proposal formally scheduled for inclusion and EIP 8198 was still under consideration. Hegotá is Ethereum’s planned upgrade following Glamsterdam, and developers have been sorting through proposals covering block production, account abstraction, privacy, validator economics and Layer 1 scaling.
Earlier drafts of EIP 8198 used eight seconds as a placeholder slot duration, while Ethlabs said Ethereum could initially reach 10 second slots through Hegotá. The exact timing remains subject to testing and agreement among Ethereum client teams.
A parallel networking track
Quick Slots is not the only effort to speed up Ethereum’s pipeline. Ethereum researchers this week reported sub one second propagation for a simulated 1 MiB execution payload under EIP 8411, compared with roughly five seconds when the same payload was transmitted as a single message.
EIP 8411 takes a separate approach from Quick Slots. The draft networking proposal divides execution payloads into smaller chunks that nodes can verify and forward before receiving the entire payload. Tests involved 500 simulated nodes and prototype client code, meaning the results are early stage rather than production validated.
The two proposals are complementary: faster propagation reduces the risk that shorter slot times would increase the number of missed or reorged blocks, since nodes need to receive and validate new payloads within a tighter window. Taken together, they sketch a roadmap in which Ethereum’s consensus cadence and its data pipeline are both reworked for lower latency.
The competitive backdrop
Ethereum is not moving in a vacuum. Solana cut its target slot time from 300 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds this week, increasing the rate at which the network produces slots by nearly 17 percent, with 200 millisecond slots on the roadmap. Zcash is also pursuing block time reductions as part of its own performance agenda.
For institutions choosing where to build, confirmation speed has become a live differentiator, and Ethereum’s institutional backers appear unwilling to concede the point. Whether Quick Slots lands in Hegotá or slips to a later fork, the debate over block times has moved from a researcher curiosity to a adoption-critical priority, and the pressure from the institutional side is now explicit.
Prices at press time: BTC 77,409 USD, ETH about 2,500 USD, SOL about 105 USD, per CoinGecko data.
wait till the mev builders centralize around whoever has the fastest attestation setup. 10 seconds benefits bots before users
10 second blocks finally. every defi app i use feels that 12 second wait during volatile candles
until validator hardware requirements creep up again and home stakers get squeezed. speed aint free
configurable slot duration is the smart play. drop to 10 first, measure, then go lower. ethlabs clearly thinking about state growth here
lubin and sharplink money behind ethereum institutional, their support for quick slots was never in doubt lol
never in doubt is right, lubin has been pushing infra speedups since consensus was a slide deck
12 to 10 seconds sounds tiny until you realize every validator has to retune attestation timing. making slot duration configurable in EIP 8198 instead of one big cut is the right architecture
Every validator retuning attestation timing is exactly the risk nobody prices in. Shipping EIP 8198 configurable first at least gives client teams an exit ramp.
^ exactly, gradual reduction is the only reason hegota has any chance of shipping without chaos
Banks are not going to wait 12 seconds for settlement confirmation on tokenized assets. Ethereum Institutional backing quick slots makes complete sense from their side.