Key Points
- Vitalik Buterin suggests methods to increase Ethereum transaction speeds.
- Ethereum’s price continues to struggle amidst negative market sentiment.
Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum (ETH), has put forward several suggestions aimed at increasing the speed of transaction confirmations on the blockchain network.
Buterin’s Proposals
Following the Merge, the confirmation time on the Ethereum network has decreased to between 5-20 seconds. However, Buterin believes that further improvements are necessary, as the current consensus mechanism can take up to 12.8 minutes for a ‘secure’ final confirmation.
To address this, Buterin has proposed several methods, including SSF (Single Slot Finality), Based, and rollup pre-confirmations. With SSF, transactions can be confirmed even when fewer validators are online. He explained that “Single-slot finality allows the chain to keep going and recover if more than 1/3 of validators go offline.”
Additional Suggestions
Buterin also recommended the use of Layer 2s (L2s) to speed up transaction confirmations. Under this system, rollups would use a few groups of validators to quickly confirm transactions, which are later finalized on the main chain, the Ethereum layer (L1).
The Based pre-confirmations approach, similar to Solana’s [SOL] priority fees, allows validators to charge an additional fee for quicker confirmation of high-priority transactions. Buterin suggested a similar system but with a penalty for validators or proposers who fail to honor agreements with users. He noted, “If the proposer violates any promise that they make to any user, they can get slashed.”
Despite acknowledging that these proposals are not perfect, Buterin believes they provide a solid foundation for further improvements to increase confirmation speeds.
Ethereum’s Price Struggles
In the meantime, Ethereum’s price has not been ‘speeding’ up. The cryptocurrency has had difficulty surpassing the 50-day EMA (Exponential Moving Average), a key resistance point since late June. Both higher and lower timeframe market structures were bearish, and the RSI (Relative Strength Index) indicated that sellers had market leverage.
The price retracement has eased to a key support level at $3300. However, the delayed final approval and launch of the ETH ETF could further dampen market sentiment. If Bitcoin (BTC) continues to post losses below $60K, Ethereum could drop below the $3300 support level. In such a scenario, the next bearish target could be the 200-day EMA, which is nearly $3000. On the other hand, the $4000 level remains a key supply zone and bullish target if market sentiment swings in favor of Ethereum.
