The purpose is the guarantee that a transaction can no longer be reversed or altered.
Currently, in Ethereum the finality of the blocks is reached between 12 and 16 minutes.
The Ethereum ecosystem received a plan to reduce the irreversible confirmation time of its transactions from around 16 minutes currently to around 13 seconds. The strategy was published this May 11 by Ben Edgington, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation (EF) and coordinator of the team dedicated to accelerating this process, as the first installment of a series of four articles.
In Ethereum, the purpose is guarantee that a transaction can no longer be reversed or altered. Achieving it requires completing two rounds of voting among the network’s validators, a process that takes between 12 and 16 minutes under normal conditions, according to Edgington’s article.
Until this occurs, there is a window during which the most recent blocks are technically vulnerable to being reorganized: Replaced by an alternative string that could alter the order or validity of the transactions they contain.
According to Edgington, between 63 and 95 blocks remain unfinished at any given time. Forcing a malicious reorganization of that queue is extremely difficult, but its existence forces exchanges, second layer (L2) networks, and cross-chain transfer protocols to implement alternative solutions that add complexity and costs.
For example, centralized exchanges, the developer explains, usually wait a certain number of block confirmations before crediting a deposit, without waiting for full completion. L2 networks recognize deposits after just a few blocks, meaning a shakeup on Ethereum could trigger a shakeup on those chains.
The decoupling of votes: the change that enables everything else
The central obstacle that Edgington identifies is that validator votes currently meet two different functions within the same structure.
On the one hand, They vote for the block they consider to be the correct head of the chain (the mechanism that allows the network to advance block by block). On the other hand, they vote for the checkpoints that will lead to the goal. Both votes travel together in what the protocol calls a attestation (voting structure), and that combination forces the finality process to become tied to the timing and restrictions of the block construction mechanism.
The proposed solution is to completely separate both types of votes to circulate and process independently. According to the article, this decoupling is the enabling change: once finality votes operate on their own channel and with their own bandwidth, it is possible to optimize them incrementally without touching the rest of the protocol.
Edgington estimates that decoupling alone would produce a several-minute reduction in finality time, but its main value is that it opens the door to further improvements that, combined, would achieve the goal of accelerating finality by a hundredfold.
Once the votes are decoupled, the plan contemplates a series of independent optimizations that could be deployed in forks (forks) successive, according to Edgington.
An unresolved tension: speed versus diversity
Edgington warns that accelerating finality without reducing validator diversity could favor large operators with better infrastructure, making it difficult for stakers with fewer resources or in regions with limited connectivity to participate, finally affecting the decentralization of Ethereum.
The author notes that his personal goal is to achieve the accelerated goal without excluding those participants, although he recognizes that at some point the community may have to choose between greater speed and greater diversity.
What comes first: Glamsterdam, and then this plan
Vote decoupling is a leading candidate for the Ethereum I* fork, which Edgington places as an ambitious goal for 2027. That change is not part of Glamsterdam, the next Ethereum upgrade scheduled for mid-2026.
As reported by CriptoNoticias, Glamsterdam focuses, among other improvements, on triple network processing capacity raising the gas limit from 60 to 200 million through changes to block construction such as the Native Proponent-Builder Separation (ePBSfor its acronym in English), which are block-level access lists and adjustments to data creation costs. The finality mechanism is not within its scope.
Finally, Edgington clarifies that his article is not an official roadmap and that technical problems remain unresolved before implementing any changes, including post-quantum compatibility of the new consensus mechanism and redesign of the block-by-block voting process.