Vitalik Maps Ethereum’s Fast L1 Slot Reduction Plan

Vitalik Buterin walks through Ethereum’s fast L1 goal, outlining a slot time reduction path from 12 to 2 seconds via the new Strawmap vision.

Ethereum’s slot time is getting cut. Incrementally. That is the core message from co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who posted a detailed thread on X walking through the fast L1 goal outlined in Ethereum’s newly published Strawmap.

As Vitalik Buterin posted on X, the plan is to reduce slot time using what he calls a “sqrt(2) at a time” formula. The path runs: 12 seconds, down to 8, then 6, then 4, then 3, then 2. The last two steps, he noted, are more speculative and depend on heavy ongoing research.

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Fast Slots Run Their Own Lane

Buterin was clear on one thing. Fast slots sit separately at the top of the roadmap. They do not connect directly to other work. The rest of the protocol changes happen roughly the same way whether the slot time is 2 seconds or 32 seconds.

Still, there are intersection points. One is peer-to-peer improvements. Buterin pointed to work by Raul Kripalani (@raulvk) on an optimized p2p layer that uses erasure coding. Instead of each node getting a full block body from multiple peers, the setup splits each block into 8 pieces. Any 4 of those pieces reconstruct the full block. That cuts bandwidth waste and keeps redundancy high.

The stats are promising. This architecture reduces the 95th percentile block propagation time. Shorter slots become viable without security tradeoffs, aside from increased protocol complexity. Buterin said the performance-gain-to-lines-of-code ratio is favorable.

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Finality Timeline Is the Harder Part

Ethereum today takes roughly 16 minutes to finalize. The goal is to decouple slots from finality entirely. Buterin wants to use a one-round-finality BFT algorithm, specifically a Minimmit variant, to get that number down to somewhere between 6 and 16 seconds at the endgame.

That is a big change. One possible trajectory he sketched out: 16 minutes today, dropping to 10 minutes 40 seconds with 8-second slots, then 6 minutes 24 seconds with one-epoch finality, then 1 minute 12 seconds, 48 seconds, 16 seconds with Minimmit, and finally 8 seconds with more aggressive Minimmit parameters.

The whole shift gets bundled with a cryptography switch. Post-quantum hash-based signatures come along for the ride. So does a move to a maximally STARK-friendly hash function. Three options are on the table there, all under active research.

The Strawmap Is Where This All Came From

The thread from Buterin came directly in response to the Strawmap launch. As Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) announced on X, the Strawmap is a strawman roadmap published by EF Protocol, available at strawmap.org. It lays out five north stars for Ethereum’s future: fast L1, gigagas L1, teragas L2, post-quantum L1, and private L1.

Drake’s post described it as a dense, technical document for researchers, developers, and governance participants. It originated from an EF workshop in January 2026. The roadmap sketches out seven forks through 2029, running roughly one every six months.

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Quantum Resistance Arrives in Pieces

One result of the incremental approach stands out. Slots could become quantum-resistant faster than finality does. Buterin said that creates an interesting regime: if quantum computers appeared suddenly, the chain keeps producing blocks, but the finality guarantee disappears temporarily.

There is also a plan to bring these changes piece by piece. “1-epoch finality” means adjusting the current consensus from FFG-style finalization to Minimmit-style finalization as a discrete step. It’s a ship-of-Theseus style rebuild, one component replaced at a time.

Separately, Buterin flagged a possible architecture shift where only 256 to 1024 randomly selected attesters sign each slot. For fork choice purposes, that is enough. Fewer signatures means no aggregation phase, which shortens slots further.

The Strawmap is a living document. Drake confirmed it will get quarterly updates, and the EF Architecture team welcomes feedback at strawmap@ethereum.org.

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