Ethereum Developers Float Two Proposals To Improve Layer 1 Efficiency

Ethereum has been battling scaling issues since the inception of the network. However, two new proposals aim to assuage those problems, bringing network activity back to the Layer 1 and offering users the opportunity to transact on mainnet again.
Ben Adams, the co-founder of Illyriad Games and a Nethermind contributor, has proposed EIP-7781, an initiative that aims to reduce Ethereum’s slot time from 12 seconds to eight, which would lower peak bandwidth on the network.
Adams outlined three outcomes: reduced rollup latency, increased transaction throughput by roughly 33%, and distributed bandwidth usage to lower requirements, thus maintaining network efficiency.
He told The Defiant that his proposal serves three prongs.
“There has been a growing desire from the community to increase the L1 gas limit as advocated by Pump The Gas,” he said. According to Adams, since PeerDAS – which enables nodes to verify just a portion of a blob – has been delayed from the initial Pectra fork, many voices, including Vitalik Buterin, have expressed a desire to increase the blob limit before the release of PeerDAS.
Adams added that increasing the blockspeed makes based rollups (which are considered the most aligned rollups directly affected by L1 blockspeed) much faster while increasing both the gas limit and blob content.
Some prominent contributors are on board with the idea. Justin Drake, a core Ethereum researcher, wrote that his initial reaction would be to support the slot time reduction.
Drake replied on the GitHub proposal that EIP-7781 would increase throughput by 50%, along with being a great warmup for future slot duration decreases. Decentralized exchanges (DEXes) like Uniswap would be more efficient and potentially save up to $100 million in CEX-DEX arbitrage per year, plus improving the user experience of L1 contracts.
Bandwidth Concerns
Adams also pointed out some concerns.
He claimed there are issues around consensus upload bandwidth for home stakers producing blocks. “As many home connections have asymmetric bandwidth with much faster download than upload; so while they can happily download the data, they might not be able to post the data upstream in time when locally producing blocks and get reorged,” Adams said.
Although Adams indicated that he doesn’t have the hard data to quantify the concerns, PeerDAS resolves them.
Alternative Proposal
A non-minor detail surrounding this proposal is that it requires a hard fork, which means alternative proposals have been floated.
Adams highlighted EIP-7783, submitted by Ethereum core developer Giulio Rebuffo. This proposal adds the possibility of having a gradual increase in the network’s gas target over time. It also offers time to analyze network behavior “instead of setting the increase in a cliff-like manner,” wrote Rebuffo.
“It has legs, too,” Adams said. “I think there is certainly capacity for it, and the gas limit hasn't changed since the move to proof of stake when the voting moved from miners to validators.”
Not everyone agrees, however.
Paul Miller, an open-source Ethereum developer, wrote about EIP-7783 that “validators are already voicing their concern with increased bandwidth requirements, which warrants the question of why the proposal is necessary with a blob-based roadmap.”
“Gas prices have been low since the last hard fork,” he said, adding that EIP-7781 “seems like a better solution.”
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