Ethereum Researchers Propose EIP-8453 to Cut Transaction Finality to Four Minutes

Ethereum researchers led by Ben Edgington have drafted EIP-8453, dubbed 'Decoupled Consensus', to reduce transaction finality times from approximately 16 minutes to four minutes. The proposal decouples chain-head block-selection votes—handled by an available-chain committee of roughly 512 validators per slot—from full-network finality attestations requiring a two-thirds supermajority. The fourfold reduction aims to free up working capital for cross-chain bridges, lowering locked funds for a $1 million per hour service from $267,000 to $67,000, while preparing for post-quantum cryptography. The draft requires a consensus-layer hard fork and currently has no formal activation date.