Ethereum researchers have proposed a redesign that could reduce the time required for transactions to become final from about 16 minutes to roughly four minutes, potentially lowering the amount of money transfer services must keep tied up while payments settle. The draft is still unfinished and has no activation date.
A faster route to settlement
The proposal was filed on Wednesday by Ben Edgington, who coordinates Ethereum’s fast-finality research, together with Francesco D’Amato, Roberto Saltini, Yann Vonlanthen and Mikhail Kalinin. Its first objective is a fourfold reduction in finality time, although important elements of the design remain unresolved.
A transaction can appear in an Ethereum block before it is considered final. Finality is the point at which Ethereum’s validators — the computers that help secure and operate the network — commit to treating the transaction as permanent and not rewriting it. For businesses moving assets from Ethereum to another blockchain, that distinction determines when it is safe to release funds on the receiving network.
The current wait of roughly 16 minutes can create a financing cost. A transfer provider may pay a customer immediately from funds it already holds on another network, then wait for the original Ethereum transaction to become final before receiving repayment. The customer may receive the money within seconds, but the provider’s capital remains unavailable during the settlement period.
Ethereum Foundation research cited in the proposal’s context illustrates the impact. If a service advances $1 million per hour, a 16-minute delay would leave about $267,000 awaiting repayment. With a four-minute delay, the amount waiting would fall to approximately $67,000. The figures describe capital tied up in settlement rather than a change to the amount sent by the customer.
The effect is also relevant to stablecoin operators. Stablecoins are digital tokens designed to track the value of an asset such as the US dollar. Circle, the issuer of USDC, charges 0.01% for its current fast route from Ethereum, equal to $1 on a $10,000 transfer, before network and application charges. Circle’s standard route does not carry a Circle transfer fee.
Circle also limits the total value of fast transfers that can be awaiting final settlement. Each completed settlement creates room for another transfer, so a shorter Ethereum finality period could allow that capacity to turn over more quickly. According to CoinDesk, the draft could therefore matter not only to individual transactions but also to the way cross-chain transfer services manage working capital.
Separating Ethereum’s validator votes
The proposed change focuses on how Ethereum validators currently participate in consensus. Each validator casts one vote that serves two purposes: helping select the next block and helping confirm older blocks as permanent. Validators take turns, and finality is reached only after two complete rounds of voting.
Researchers want to give those two functions separate votes. Under the proposed design, the process that locks earlier blocks could operate on a faster schedule than the mechanism used to select new blocks. Developers could then continue adjusting the finality timetable without requiring both functions to move at the same pace.
The separation could have another long-term benefit. The researchers say it would make it easier to replace Ethereum’s existing signature system with signatures designed to resist attacks from sufficiently powerful quantum computers. Such an upgrade would be relevant if quantum machines eventually become capable of breaking current cryptographic methods.
The draft is not yet a completed network upgrade. Its voting timings, penalties and portions of its security analysis remained unresolved as of Thursday. Edgington wrote that many aspects were still to be determined, while describing the immediate goal as assigning the idea a proposal number and placing it in Ethereum’s formal upgrade process.
No activation date has been set. The target of about four minutes is therefore a design objective, not a live performance change on Ethereum.
Ethereum’s market picture
Moneyiar market data recorded at 22:59 on October 22, 2026, showed Ethereum at $2,381.2965, down 4.14% over 24 hours and 2.94% over seven days.
Other assets in the Moneyiar snapshot were also lower over the past day. Shiba Inu was priced at $0.0000049422, down 4.47% in 24 hours and 3.61% over seven days. Uniswap stood at $7.0006503115, down 6.76% over 24 hours and 6.13% over the week. Pepe was at $0.0000043711, down 6.52% in 24 hours but up 6.28% over seven days.
The proposed finality change concerns Ethereum’s settlement design and remains subject to further development; the market figures describe prices and performance at the stated Moneyiar timestamp, not the likely outcome of the proposal.
