Say goodbye to 12 seconds of waiting: Ethereum enters the "instant transaction" era

Compilation: Vernacular Blockchain

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

At the same time, users using ethgas-realtime nodes have completed payments, exchanged Tokens, purchased NFTs, completed transactions, registered domain names, and over 200 other things…

All of these are arranged in order, deterministic, and completed directly on the Ethereum mainnet, consuming any 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 saying 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 brought by the execution model: the state exists only in a fractured form that appears every 12 seconds. Everything in between these 12 seconds is opaque and can be exploited, which leads to MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) becoming a sort of inevitable equilibrium—and this is logically self-consistent.

Users are in such an environment: they broadcast their emotions, but the results are not guaranteed. If this is just playing a game or posting on social media, that's fine; but if we are engaging in time-sensitive bidding, or trying to fill positions before Bangkok, and get outrun by bots (getting ahead), the situation is completely different. In this case, 12 in the dark is too long.

Even if we have become accustomed to this, we cannot back down. Especially as the stakes get higher and traditional finance is on the key of the Blockchain.

Light Up 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 in ETHGas: we can play the role of Rutherford, breaking down the “atoms” of Ethereum Blocks —— and replacing any nature in the market to ensure security.

We no longer wait for the block to be finalized, but instead split each block into 120-240 “sub-blocks”, treating it as a continuous flow updated every 50-100 tens, available for users to purchase in the block space market. Preconfirmations then provide economic constraints on ordering and inclusion before the block is formally proposed. While they may not provide absolute finality, they offer execution and economic guarantees — users will gradually get used 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 intention and execution. This will transform the 12-second hidden squeeze into a formal market. Competition no longer occurs in chaotic brawls within memory pools, but rather toward clarity (upstream), where sorting rights are priced, and block space is clearly allocated. The forest generates a traceable process in real time, visible to everyone.

This is not just theory. The first batch of real-time Blocks was deployed on the Ethereum mainnet topology on November 13, 2025. In a key Block:

• Block Number: 23788705
• Available Build Window: 6,703 milliseconds
• Real-time Sub-blocks Created: 44
• Average Block Time: 152 ms
• Total number of transactions included: 71

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

From the perspective of the protocol, the core logic remains unchanged, and the final block is still proposed and finalized through the standard PBS (Proposer-Builder Separation) pipeline. The change in determining before execution is how it is generated and sent.

More than 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 the standard for applications.

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