Vitalik Buterin unpacks Ethereum’s “strawmap” push toward sub‑second confirmations and faster finality
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a radical overhaul of the network’s base-layer consensus, describing how Ethereum could move from today’s roughly 16‑minute finality to confirmation times measured in mere seconds. His analysis follows the publication of the Ethereum Foundation’s new “strawmap” – a long-horizon technical plan that sketches how Ethereum’s layer 1 could evolve through the rest of the decade.
At the heart of this vision is the concept of a “fast L1.” Instead of treating Ethereum’s base chain as something that must remain relatively slow while rollups do the heavy lifting, the strawmap imagines a progressively accelerated mainnet. The idea is to bring down both slot times and finality delays, creating a more responsive, snappier core chain without sacrificing decentralization or security.
Today, Ethereum finality – the point at which blocks are considered irreversible under normal conditions – typically takes around 16 minutes. Under the proposed trajectory, that experience could be transformed. Slot times, which are currently 12 seconds, could be reduced gradually down to about 2 seconds. In parallel, finality could compress from minutes to a window between 6 and 16 seconds, thanks to a new one‑round Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT)-style protocol known as Minimmit.
Buterin stresses that this acceleration is not about reckless speed. Any reduction in slot length would be introduced step by step, only when it can be demonstrated that the network can safely handle the change. One suggested pattern is to shorten slots using a “square root of 2 at a time” rule – for instance, tweaking parameters so that each step reduces slot times by a factor of √2 rather than jumping directly from 12 to 2 seconds. This gradualism allows developers and researchers to observe real-world effects at each stage.
To make these faster slots viable, the network’s underlying plumbing must be upgraded. A crucial dependency is improved peer‑to‑peer (P2P) networking. The strawmap envisions the use of erasure coding to make block propagation more efficient. Instead of each node needing to receive full blocks in a naive way, erasure coding can help nodes reconstruct blocks from smaller, more redundant fragments, reducing latency and improving resilience to poor network conditions or partial data loss.
Alongside networking enhancements, the consensus architecture itself would be streamlined. One of the major bottlenecks in Ethereum’s current proof‑of‑stake system is signature aggregation. Since thousands of validators can participate in attesting to each slot, collecting and verifying all those signatures adds overhead. The strawmap contemplates limiting the number of active attesters per slot, not by reducing total validator participation forever, but by changing how and when validators are called upon. This would lower the computational and bandwidth demands per block while still preserving strong security guarantees.
The strawmap, introduced publicly by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, doesn’t focus on a single feature. Instead, it defines five long‑term “north stars” to guide protocol research and development: a fast base layer, a layer 1 capable of gigagas throughput, layer 2 ecosystems operating at teragas scale, robust post‑quantum security, and built‑in privacy features. These targets are spread across seven anticipated network upgrades, or forks, projected through 2029, with changes divided logically among the consensus, data availability, and execution layers.
One striking aspect of Buterin’s commentary is how he frames the most disruptive upgrades. Many of the deepest changes – especially those needed to resist future quantum computers, such as hash‑based, quantum‑resistant signatures – are unlikely to ship as a single “big bang” release. Instead, he describes a more incremental “Ship of Theseus” approach: over time, component by component, Ethereum’s consensus and cryptographic assumptions are replaced, until a fundamentally different system exists, yet the chain’s continuity and history remain intact.
Although the strawmap is explicitly positioned as a coordination tool rather than a binding roadmap, it still sends a clear signal. Ethereum’s core research direction is orienting around three main themes: significantly faster and smoother user experience at the base layer, cryptographic hardening against emerging threats (notably quantum attacks), and end‑to‑end formal verification, where more and more of the protocol is mathematically proven correct rather than only tested empirically.
For everyday users, faster slots and near‑instant finality could change how Ethereum feels. Today, many dapps and wallets must either wait on multiple confirmations or lean on additional infrastructure layers to provide a “good enough” sense of certainty. With finality in the range of a few seconds, user interfaces could confidently display transactions as final almost immediately, bridging the psychological gap between blockchain interactions and the responsiveness people expect from traditional web applications.
For developers and infrastructure providers, a fast L1 could reshape how applications are architected. Rollups and other layer‑2 solutions would still handle much of the throughput and cost optimization, but their settlement to Ethereum would become dramatically quicker. A rollup batch that today might wait many minutes before being considered finalized could, in the strawmap’s world, anchor itself securely in a fraction of that time. This, in turn, can lower risk for bridges, cross‑chain protocols, and complex DeFi compositions that depend on timely, trustworthy state updates.
There are trade‑offs and risks, which the strawmap acknowledges. Faster slot times mean less leeway for blocks to propagate across the network before the next one arrives. If networking performance is not sufficiently robust, the probability of forks and missed slots could increase, degrading stability. Similarly, reducing the number of attesters per slot requires careful protocol design to ensure that validator incentives remain aligned and that no small group can exert outsized influence. Much of the roadmap’s research focus is on precisely these edge cases.
Minimmit, the proposed BFT‑style finality gadget, sits at the center of this effort. Traditional BFT protocols can provide very fast finality but often struggle to scale to decentralized environments with hundreds of thousands of participants. The challenge is to keep the single‑round finality properties of BFT – where agreement can be reached in one communication round if conditions are favorable – while designing a validator participation model that works at Ethereum’s scale. Buterin’s write‑up indicates that Minimmit is intended to strike that balance by structuring committees and signatures in a way that retains strong security while keeping bandwidth manageable.
The quest for post‑quantum security adds another layer of complexity. While quantum computers capable of breaking today’s widely used public‑key schemes do not yet exist, the long shelf‑life of blockchain data means the ecosystem must anticipate that future. The strawmap’s emphasis on hash‑based signatures and other quantum‑resistant primitives reflects a recognition that Ethereum’s consensus, staking, and account models will eventually need to be upgraded so that signatures and keys recorded today do not become a liability tomorrow. This transition is one of the reasons the “Ship of Theseus” metaphor is so apt: it implies a carefully staged migration rather than an abrupt flip of a switch.
Privacy is also elevated from an afterthought to a first‑class design objective. Native privacy, in this context, is not limited to ad‑hoc mixers or standalone privacy coins. Instead, it points toward protocol‑level support for confidential transactions, private state, and zero‑knowledge proof-based verification. When combined with faster slots, such capabilities could make private applications – from voting systems to confidential DeFi – far more practical, as users get both discretion and real‑time responsiveness.
On the throughput front, the gigagas L1 and teragas L2 goals clarify how the ecosystem’s scalability narrative is evolving. Rather than seeing layer 1 stagnate while all improvements happen on layer 2, the strawmap argues for a coordinated advance: the base layer becomes faster and more capable, while rollups and other L2s multiply that capacity by orders of magnitude. Data availability enhancements, compression schemes, and more efficient proof systems are all expected to contribute to this compounded scaling effect.
From an economic and governance perspective, these changes could influence validator operations and staking strategies. Shorter slots and more frequent attestations might modify hardware requirements and bandwidth expectations, potentially nudging operators toward more efficient setups or specialized infrastructure providers. At the same time, a carefully designed cap on per‑slot attesters could help keep participation accessible by limiting the per‑block load on individual validators, preserving a broad and diverse validator set.
Over the multi‑year horizon the strawmap covers, one of the key challenges will be maintaining backward compatibility and minimizing disruption for users and developers. Each fork in the sequence must both move Ethereum closer to the long‑term north stars and avoid fracturing the ecosystem. This is where formal verification and conservative, incremental parameter changes become essential. By proving more components correct and by rolling out changes in well‑tested phases, the community can reduce the risk of consensus bugs or catastrophic regressions.
In sum, Buterin’s breakdown of the strawmap paints a picture of Ethereum shifting from a relatively slow‑finality base layer to a high‑assurance, near‑real‑time settlement network. Faster slots, Minimmit‑style finality, quantum‑resistant cryptography, and built‑in privacy are not isolated upgrades but interlocking pieces of a broader redesign. If the plan succeeds, Ethereum by the end of the decade could look and feel very different: a chain that settles in seconds, scales in tandem with its rollups, and is architected from the ground up to endure both technological and cryptographic shocks in the decades to come.