Ethereum Targets Four-Minute Settlement to Make Crypto Transfers Cheaper

Ethereum researchers have proposed reducing transaction finality from approximately 16 minutes to around four minutes, a change that could lower the cost of transferring funds between blockchain networks. Faster settlement would allow payment services to recover money sooner and reduce the capital they must keep tied up while transactions are finalized.

Ben Edgington, who coordinates Ethereum’s fast-finality research, submitted the draft on Wednesday alongside researchers Francesco D’Amato, Roberto Saltini, Yann Vonlanthen, and Mikhail Kalinin.

The proposal aims to make finality four times faster, although the design remains under development and no activation date has been announced.

On Ethereum, transactions can be included in a block before they reach finality. Finality is the point at which validators, the computers securing the network, commit to the transaction history and prevent finalized blocks from being reversed under the protocol’s security assumptions.

For services transferring assets from Ethereum to another blockchain, determining when a transaction is sufficiently secure is important before releasing funds on the destination network.

Faster Finality Could Reduce Transfer Costs

A 16-minute settlement period can leave substantial amounts of money temporarily unavailable to transfer services.

Consider a customer moving $10,000 from Ethereum to another network. A transfer provider might send the customer funds from its existing balance on the destination chain, then wait for the original transaction to finalize before recovering that amount.

The customer could receive the money within seconds, but the provider would have $10,000 tied up until settlement is complete.

Ethereum Foundation research identifies this waiting period as a cost for businesses that advance funds before transactions finalize. Reducing the delay would allow those firms to recycle their capital more quickly.

For a service advancing $1 million every hour, a 16-minute settlement delay would leave approximately $267,000 awaiting repayment at any given time. With a four-minute delay, that amount would fall to around $67,000.

Stablecoin issuers and transfer providers already offer faster services at a price. Circle, the company behind the dollar-pegged USDC stablecoin, currently charges 0.01% for its fast transfer route from Ethereum, equivalent to $1 on a $10,000 transfer, before network and application fees. Its standard route does not carry a Circle transfer fee.

Circle also limits the total value of fast transfers awaiting final settlement. Once transactions settle, the released capacity can be used for additional transfers.

Separating Ethereum’s Validator Votes

The proposed improvement focuses on how Ethereum validators vote.

Under the current system, each validator casts one vote that serves two purposes: helping determine the next block and contributing to the finalization of earlier blocks. Validators take turns participating, and finality requires two complete rounds of voting.

Because both responsibilities rely on the same voting process, transaction finality is constrained by the time needed to complete those rounds.

The draft proposes separating the two functions into distinct votes. This would allow finality to operate on a faster schedule, which developers could potentially optimize further over time.

The researchers also argue that separating the voting functions could simplify a future transition to quantum-resistant digital signatures. Such a change could become necessary if quantum computers eventually become capable of breaking the cryptographic systems currently used to secure blockchain networks.

Ethereum Still Trails Solana’s Finality Target

Even if the proposal achieves its four-minute goal, Ethereum’s settlement speed would remain considerably slower than Solana’s target of approximately 150 milliseconds under its Alpenglow upgrade, which went live on Wednesday.

Ethereum’s draft is still at an early stage. As of Thursday, several details remained unresolved, including voting schedules, penalties, and parts of the security analysis.

Edgington noted that many aspects were still to be determined, explaining that the immediate objective was to assign the proposal a number and formally introduce the idea into Ethereum’s upgrade process.

The proposal therefore represents an initial step toward faster settlement rather than a confirmed network change. If implemented, it could reduce the amount of capital transfer providers need to keep waiting for transactions to finalize, potentially making cross-chain money movement more efficient.

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