Ethereum research draft proposes to shorten transaction finality to approximately 4 minutes to reduce cross-chain transfer costs.

BlockBeats news, October 22 — Ben Edgington, coordinator of Ethereum's fast finality research direction, along with multiple researchers, submitted a draft proposal to shorten the transaction finality wait time from approximately 16 minutes to approximately 4 minutes, a roughly fourfold improvement. The current goal is to push the draft into the formal upgrade proposal process. The core idea of the draft is to separate the validator's original combined mechanism of "block selection" and "finality confirmation," allowing finality to advance at a faster pace and facilitating a future switch to quantum-resistant signatures.

Faster finality is expected to reduce costs incurred by cross-chain transfer services due to capital occupation. The Ethereum Foundation's research cited an example: if a service advances approximately $1 million per hour, under a 16-minute delay about $267,000 would be pending recovery, and after shortening to 4 minutes this could drop to approximately $67,000.