Trading is no longer going in circles, with mainnet confirmations in seconds.

Author: Kevin Lepsoe

Translation: Baihua Blockchain

By the time you finish reading this paragraph, an ordinary Ethereum user might have just made a payment, or exchanged some tokens, or purchased an NFT, or completed a transaction, or registered a decentralized domain name… The key words are "or" and "might."

At the same time, users utilizing the ethgas-realtime node have completed payments, exchanged tokens, purchased NFTs, completed transactions, registered domain names, and over 200 other tasks…

All of this is sequential, deterministic, and completed directly on the Ethereum mainnet, consuming no L2 (Layer 2 network). How is this achieved?

Twelve Seconds: The "Dark Age" of Finance

A few years ago, Ethereum was described as a "dark forest." I can still understand why this phrase resonated with developers and users at the time. The Ethereum mempool is a place where every transaction is a signal, every signal is monitored, and every action assumes the presence of an adversary.

This is the downside of the execution model: state exists only in fragmented forms every 12 seconds. Everything in between these 12 seconds is opaque and exploitable, leading to MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) becoming a sort of inevitable equilibrium—and this is logically self-consistent.

Users exist in such an environment: they broadcast their intentions, but the outcomes are not guaranteed. If this were just a game or a social media update, it would be fine; but if we are engaged in time-sensitive bidding, or trying to fill orders before Bangkok, only to be outpaced by bots (front-running), the situation is entirely different. In this case, twelve seconds in the dark is too long.

Even if we have become accustomed to this, we cannot retreat. Especially as the stakes get higher, traditional finance is on the critical path of the mouse chain.

Illuminating the Forest

Ethereum is the most decentralized and economically significant settlement layer globally, but the allocation of block space has not kept pace with the development of its upper-layer applications. When users, developers, and the market have become accustomed to real-time operations, the blockchain can no longer be viewed as discrete events occurring every 12 seconds.

This is what we realized at ETHGas: we can play the role of Rutherford, disassembling the "atoms" of Ethereum blocks—and replace any nature of the marketplace to ensure security.

We no longer wait for blocks to be finalized, but instead split each block into 120-240 "sub-blocks," treating them as a continuous flow updated every 50-100 milliseconds, available for users to purchase in the block space market. Preconfirmations then provide economic constraints on ordering and inclusion before the block is officially proposed. While they may not provide absolute finality, they offer execution and economic guarantees—users will gradually become accustomed to these "soft confirmations" becoming the norm.

In other words, we can have "Realtime Ethereum."

The transition to Ethereum illuminates the dark forest by eliminating the gap between intent and execution. This will turn the 12 seconds of hidden extraction into a formal market. Competition no longer occurs in chaotic battles within the memory pool, but rather flows upstream clearly, ordering rights are priced, and block space is explicitly allocated. The forest generates a traceable real-time process, visible to everyone.

This is not just theoretical. The first batch of real-time blocks was topologically deployed on the Ethereum mainnet on November 13, 2025. In a key block:

• Block Number: 23788705

• Available Build Window: 6,703 milliseconds

• Real-time Sub-blocks Built: 44

• Average Sub-block Time: 152 milliseconds

• Total Transactions Included: 71

For users, this means transactions can be instant, certain, and fair. For applications, simply pointing the application's RPC endpoint to a real-time supported endpoint fundamentally expands the design space.

From a protocol perspective, the core logic remains unchanged, and final blocks are still proposed and finalized through the standard PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) pipeline. The change is in how execution is produced and sent before confirmation.

Over 4% of Ethereum validators have joined this block space market alongside builders and wholesale network participants. By the end of 2026, real-time execution will become standard for applications.

Article link: https://www.hellobtc.com/kp/du/12/6172.html

Source: https://x.com/lepsoe/status/2001928673084207184

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。