Ben Edgington, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, published findings from a stakeholder research project on Ethereum's finality roadmap, interviewing 19 individuals and organizations including L2s, bridges, solvers, staking services, wallets, and institutional teams. The research found that finality in tens of seconds would unlock substantial benefits for most Ethereum use cases, and that target looks achievable in the near term compared to one-second finality.

The biggest beneficiary will be cross-chain infrastructure. Bridges and solvers advance capital while waiting for finality, and every minute of delay ties up capital and raises user fees. For L2s, faster finality improves deposit onboarding, blob-cost pricing accuracy, and private cross-chain messaging that cannot tolerate third-party solvers. The target sweet spot across stakeholders: 10 to 30 seconds for bridges and interop, under a minute for most interactive flows.

On validator set design, stakeholders expressed that Ethereum should not compete with fast alt-L1s by weakening its decentralization. Consolidating duplicate validators run by large operators behind the same infrastructure was viewed as a top priority. Stakeholders were firm on not prricing out home stakers or hard-capping validator counts.

Edgington noted that decoupling finality from slot-by-slot fork choice, improving aggregation, and managing validator consolidation offers a clear path to meaningful improvement without weakening Ethereum's core guarantees.

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