Ethereum Unveils Four-Year Roadmap for Faster, Quantum-Resistant Blockchain

Ethereum's development team has outlined a four-year roadmap to significantly improve the performance and security of the blockchain.

The plan focuses on reducing block production time, known as slot time, from its current 12 seconds to as low as 2 seconds. This will make Ethereum feel more like a live system, rather than one that requires waiting for transactions to be confirmed.

According to Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the reduction in slot time will follow an incremental approach, with each step building on previous changes. The goal is to reduce the time it takes to produce new blocks by roughly following a square-root-of-two formula, starting from 12 seconds and gradually decreasing to 8, 6, 4, and eventually 2 seconds.

The roadmap also emphasizes the importance of finality times, which currently take around 16 minutes. The plan is to reduce finality times to between 6 and 16 seconds by introducing a new, cleaner, and simpler confirmation system that is also quantum-resistant.

Buterin notes that this approach will allow for the decoupling of slots and finality, enabling developers to reason about both independently. He also highlights the potential benefits of making slots quantum-resistant before finality, which could provide an added layer of security against future threats from quantum computers.