Vitalik Backs Fast Confirmation Rule for Faster Ethereum Deposits

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum (ETH), has endorsed a new rule called the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) that aims to speed up transaction confirmations on the network.

The FCR was proposed by researcher Julian Ma and is designed to reduce deposit times from the mainnet to Layer 2 networks and centralized exchanges from roughly 13 minutes to approximately 13 seconds.

This new rule targets one of the most persistent friction points in the Ethereum ecosystem: the delay incurred when moving assets from the base layer to L2s or exchanges. The current 'k-deep' confirmation rules rely on waiting for a transaction to be buried beneath a fixed number of subsequent blocks, which offer no formal security guarantees.

The FCR replaces this heuristic with an attestation-based model that counts validator votes rather than blocks. Under normal network conditions, a block is treated as confirmed once sufficient validator attestations have accumulated - a process that takes roughly 13 seconds. However, the mechanism operates one level below Ethereum's formal finality and rests on two explicit assumptions: that the network delivers attestations within approximately 8 seconds, and that no single actor controls more than 25% of staked ETH.

If either condition fails, FCR stalls and falls back to the finalized head rather than producing an unsafe confirmation. Consensus layer client teams are already working on implementations, which will activate via a configuration flag and query the existing JSON-RPC safe tag - requiring no new API endpoints and no network-wide coordination.