Yesterday, there was some outcry on Twitter around increasing blocktime on mainnet and for good reason. While none of these changes have been formally accepted by the community, there is a push towards single-slot finality which enables stuff like ePBS which can enable stuff like MEV burn. The blocktime has been proposed to increase to accommodate increased message-passing without requiring meaningful upgrades to validator hardware. Numbers have been thrown out anywhere from 16 to 20 seconds.

Onchain trading is the core crypto usecase and the most common activity onchain after asset transfers. Increasing the blocktimes will inevitably harm dex users and further push them to places with shorter blocktimes. Pushing dex users elsewhere is potentially inevitable, but it’s worth noting we’ve yet to see meaningful liquidity, volume, and users actually migrate to L2s or alt-L1s. Last I checked, the speed of light is ~3e8 m/s and the circumfrence of Earth is ~4e7.

The blocktime discussion is emblematic of the larger trend of dissent and disconnect betweeen users/application developers and core developers / protocol researchers which has been a hot enough topic that it got Gwart to write longform. Personally, think it’s important for the preferences of users/application devs to be strongly considered in the core development process, which has historically not been the case. Don’t necessarily see why this won’t repeat itself on L2s with generic execution environments and permissionless deployments. In some ways, this disconnect is the bull case for appchains as the incentives and values should be more tightly aligned, though with its own tradeoffs.

Hopefully the blocktimes don’t go up and instead go down. I’m doubtful that SSF gets prioritized in the near future.