The clock is ticking, and Ethereum wants to make it tick a whole lot faster. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin has put forward bold plans to cut the network’s block production time from 12 seconds down to as low as two, while squeezing transaction finality from around 16 minutes to somewhere between six and 16 seconds.
Buterin spoke up on Thursday with fresh detail on the Ethereum Foundation’s newly released visual roadmap—called “Strawmap”—which lays out a major upgrade path for the world’s second-largest blockchain over the coming four years.
Rather than abruptly altering the network, Buterin envisions a gradual decrease in slot time—the interval between each new block Ethereum generates. He wants to follow a roughly square-root-of-two pattern: 12 seconds, followed by eight, six, four, and finally two seconds. Each step gives developers room to check security and performance before pushing further ahead. “I expect to see progressive decreases in both slot time and finality time,” Buterin said.
Faster Nodes, Cleaner Finality
Alongside block speed, the Strawmap takes direct aim at how Ethereum nodes talk to each other. Cutting down on repeated data sent between nodes means new blocks travel across the network more quickly. This will enable shorter slot times without compromising security or overloading the system.
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Finality sits at the core of the roadmap’s second big push. Right now, Ethereum takes roughly 16 minutes before a transaction is locked in for good. The Strawmap wants to pull that window down to somewhere between six and 16 seconds, ditching the current layered confirmation process in favor of something cleaner and built to withstand future quantum computing threats.
Buterin called the finality changes a “very invasive set of changes” and said the team plans to roll the biggest upgrade together with a full cryptographic switch to post-quantum hash-based signatures. Essentially, it wants to bundle two heavy shifts into one move to keep disruption manageable across planned forks.
Quantum Resistance Arrives in Stages
One ripple effect of taking things step by step is that slots would go quantum-resistant before finality does. Buterin pointed out that if quantum computers showed up out of nowhere, the chain would keep running even if finality guarantees took a temporary hit.
Seven forks (or changes) may happen across the four-year window, landing roughly every six months. Two of them—Glamsterdam and Hegotá—are already locked in for later this year.
