Ethereum researchers propose reducing transaction finality from 16 to four minutes

Ethereum researchers proposed cutting transaction finality from about 16 minutes to roughly four minutes, a change that could lower costs for cross-chain transfer services by allowing faster fund recovery and reuse. This proposal, filed by Ben Edgington and others, aims for a four-fold improvement by separating validators’ block-selection and finality votes, though the design is unfinished and has no activation date. For a service fronting $1 million an hour, the waiting capital tied up for repayment would drop from about $267,000 with a 16-minute delay to roughly $67,000 with a four-minute delay.