New EIP-7781 to make Ethereum faster by 33%

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A new EIP to make Ethereum faster

Everyone wants the Ethereum network to be faster. This can be achieved in one of three ways:

1. Reduce slot times (i.e. the time intervals between newly proposed blocks).
2. Make blocks bigger by increasing gas limits.
3. Improve blob (Binary Large OBject) transactions capacity, a temporary form of data structure introduced in EIP-4844 that allowed L2s to settle to Ethereum more cheaply.

This weekend saw the emergence of the newly proposed EIP-7781 aimed at the first.

Proposed by Ben Adams, co-founder of Illyriad Games and Nethermind contributor, EIP-7781 wants to shorten slot times on the Ethereum L1 from from 12 seconds to eight seconds.

The proposal cites EIP-7781’s impact as an improvement in overall throughput by 33% and reduced latency for based L2 rollups, which roughly translates to a hypothetical gas limit increase from 30 million to 40 million or a blob count increase from six to eight.

Since block sizes remain unchanged, aggregate peak bandwidth demands will not rise either.

In other words, Ethereum would be faster, without increasing the bandwidth requirements on individual nodes (though the impact on hardware is up for debate).

The new proposal has received the approval of Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, who agrees EIP-7781 would roughly increase throughput by 50%, make DEXs like Uniswap roughly 1.22x more efficient and reduce confirmation times of L1 contracts by one-third. 

If passed, EIP-7781 would have significant positive impacts on based rollups like Taiko, whose architecture leverages the sequencer of the L1 (and thereby is constrained by L1 block times), as opposed to traditional rollups like Optimism and Arbitrum, who run their own centralized sequencers.

It’s a welcome change but one wonders if it’s just another EIP on an Ethereum roadmap already chock-full of EIPs waiting to be implemented. 

Recall that the upcoming Pectra hard fork (with already 20+ EIPs) that was scheduled in early 2025 was split in two during the last Ethereum All Core Developers (ACD) call. 

ETH Core Dev Alex Stokes, who moderated the last ACD, cited Pectra as “one of the biggest hard forks we have had in Ethereum history.”

Chart of the Day

Polymarket hits all-time highs in daily trading volumes: 

Source: Blockworks Research (h/t Dan Smith)

Polymarket is racking up all-time highs in daily trading volumes. On Sunday, 82% ($79.3 million) of volumes came from the “elections” category. The biggest market by far is still the “Presidential Election Winner 2024” prediction market, with about $1.38 billion worth of bets riding on it. It’s right now giving Trump a 51% lead compared to Harris’s 47.9%.

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