Is potuz's mini payload design an alternative to quick slots, or only a complement?
Protocol design · 4 participants · 8 quotes · 2026-09-19 ~ 2026-09-20
potuz put forward a design that reveals several payloads sequentially within one slot to reduce inclusion latency, as an alternative to quick slots, and Barnabé Monnot countered that this is a weak preconf and cannot replace the confirmation guarantee quick slots provide, so it is a complement, not an alternative. terence Tsao summarized that the benefits are clear but that loss of fast finality and implementation complexity are the tradeoffs.
Background
Quick slots are a Hegotá fork candidate proposal that shortens slot time to make transaction inclusion and confirmation faster. potuz's alternative keeps slot time unchanged and reduces inclusion latency by sequentially revealing independent, individually complete payloads within one slot. With Gloas, the maximum inclusion latency is 18 seconds, and potuz calculates that adding only a PTC (Payload Timeliness Committee) bitlist can cut it to 8 seconds. An ahead-of-time auction is a method where a sequencer auctions the inclusion order before a set slot, and potuz opposes introducing it on L1, citing Arbitrum's Timeboost as an example.
Why it matters
As quick slots are discussed as a Hegotá fork candidate, the landscape of alternatives was laid out concretely for the first time, covering what to sacrifice and what to speed up. The tradeoff between fast finality and low inclusion latency, and whether to introduce an ahead-of-time auction on L1, are issues for later core developer calls.
Key points
- Can a mini payload chain replace the inclusion guarantee of quick slots, that is, a confirmation that can only be reverted by a full block reorg?
- Does it actually shorten inclusion latency without reducing slot time, or does one still have to wait 12 seconds?
- Is it right to introduce an ahead-of-time auction on L1?
For — It can be an alternative to quick slots
Potuz
- If independent, individually complete payloads are revealed sequentially within one slot, each becomes an immediately honest block from the EL (execution layer) point of view, and only the safe and finalized hashes are delayed and advanced in two or three steps
- Adding only a PTC bitlist cuts the maximum inclusion latency from 18 seconds to 8 seconds with Gloas
- An ahead-of-time auction should not be introduced on L1. Even Timeboost, the only one in operation, is easy to manipulate and Arbitrum is phasing it out, and in a permissionless environment with a sequencing monopoly it would be far worse
Against — It is a complement, not an alternative
Barnabé Monnot | barnabé.eth
- This is a weak preconfirmation, so it cannot give the inclusion confirmation that quick slots provide, a finality guarantee that can only be reverted by a reorg of the full block
- Without a shorter slot time, you still have to wait 12 seconds for 'transaction included' to appear in your wallet
- Taking advantage of fast inclusion of partial blocks would require rebuilding a significant amount of tooling
Neutral — The benefits are clear, but there are tradeoffs
terence
- These are not partial payloads but complete, independent payloads, and the commitments only delay the broadcast, as they do today
- Inclusion time should be treated as 8 seconds at most, 6 seconds on average and 4 seconds at best, and cutting it from 18 seconds to 8 seconds is already substantial
- The benefits are clear, but the tradeoffs are the loss of fast finality and the added implementation complexity, which is limited but real, and it may be better to reorg all three if any one of the mini payloads is late
Other — The root problem is the definition of censorship resistance
dataalways ⚡️🤖
- The root of the problem is that developers and researchers excluded execution quality from the definition of censorship resistance (CR) and defined it only as 'an attempt to eventually be included onchain at some point'
- The foundation for better UX and fast inclusion guarantees should have been built on CR mechanisms, but it was not
- Ethereum has never prioritized UX, which narrowed the solution space, and that is why things like pre-auctions have come to look convenient