Happy to report that after a month of work, EIP-8198 aka Quick Slots was merged as a feature spec in the Ethereum consensus specs! Many thanks to @jih2nn and @JustinTraglia for their tireless work as spec maintainers 🙌 What does "merging specifications" mean? Specifying a feature means writing up its behaviour, in code and in English, in a repository that has accumulated the detailed description of every feature since the launch of Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake chain. This is the ground truth of how Ethereum consensus runs, and the model that all consensus clients follow to come to agreement with each other. Anyone can contribute to this repository, by submitting “pull requests” with more code and more text specifying a new feature. Pull requests remain open while the proposed changes and additions are reviewed, by specs maintainers and by the persons submitting their contributions. Once they have been sufficiently reviewed, with edge cases uncovered, the pull request can then be “merged”, and live inside the codebase of the specs, instead of besides it. This is usually a signal that the feature’s specs are now stable enough to evaluate in the context of other proposed changes. In particular, it also makes it easier for clients who want to start prototyping the feature, to do so on specifications that are no longer expected to change drastically. There can still be misses and unknowns, but at least the current thing has passed this first, close review. Importantly, this does not mean that faster slots have made it into Hegotá. We are still two steps away from it: Quick slots were Proposed for Inclusion on August 6th, and next week, on October 1st, we will likely be discussing raising its level to Considered for Inclusion at ACD. Should a decision then be made to include in the fork, quick slots would then become Scheduled for Inclusion, the last step. PFI -> CFI -> SFI. Easy eh? 😅 So this means the job's not done 🫡 We'll continue to advocate for a strong prototype of quick slots based on the specifications. We're continuing our outreach to ecosystem smart contracts and teams for who a slot change may impact their operations. And we're continuing to research the future of shortening slot times with post-quantum cryptography and zkEVM in view, beyond Hegotá. In the meantime, find the specs here: