Ethereum is many things; it is the second biggest cryptocurrency, one of the best networks, and hosts many amazing dApps, but Ethereum is also far from perfect.

The smart contract-enabled blockchain is still riddled with many issues its users face daily. Ethereum has also been known for tackling its network’s issues one after the other, and it seems there’s a new upgrade just around the corner.

A new Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) introduced on October 5 by Ben Adams, the co-founder of Illyriad Games, got the crypto internet buzzing as soon as it was announced.

Named EIP-7781, the newest Ethereum Improvement Proposal will reportedly reduce block times on Ethereum by 33% (from 12 seconds to 8 seconds) and increase data capacity, which, when combined, will boost Ethereum’s total throughput by 50%. 

Apart from boosting block times on the network from twelve to eight seconds, the new proposal, if approved, will increase the latency of based rollups and boost the capacity of blobs, the temporary data structure used to reduce the fees of the layer 2 network.

While there have certainly been other upgrades, the pseudonymous developer Cygaar took to his X account to post that EIP-7781 would be the first huge step toward improving the base layer of the Ethereum Network as a whole, since most of the attention of developers is aimed at Ethereum L-2 networks as scaling solutions.

The new tentative proposal involves more than block-time upgrades. It also involves lowering peak bandwidth requirements by distributing bandwidth usage over time without increasing individual block or blob counts.

Although EIP-7781 has not been officially approved, it’s already garnering massive acclaim from the crypto community. One person who has shared his approval is Justin Drake. The Ethereum Foundation researcher said nothing but good things about the proposal. 

For one, Drake believes the proposal aligned with some of the broader goals Ethereum and its founders already set for Ethereum and Ethereum scaling organizations.

Drake also believes that reducing block times will significantly benefit decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap v3. He believes it could make these decentralized exchanges “1.22x more efficient” and save about “$100M in CEX-DEX arbitrage per year, ultimately leading to better execution for users.”

The newly announced proposal's benefits continue; according to Drake, it will also improve the user experience of Ethereum smart contracts by reducing confirmation times by about 33% and smoothing out “peak load” across more slots.

But it’s also not all good. Several developers have noted that the proposal may have some unpleasant side effects. The most obvious one is that reducing block times could harm solo stakes. It could also cause execution state growth, increasing the data on a blockchain. The new proposal's pros and cons will surely be weighed before approval.

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