Image Credit: Shutterstock
Ethereum researchers have cut median propagation time for a simulated 1 MiB execution payload from about five seconds to below one second using EIP-8411, a draft proposal that breaks large payloads into independently verifiable pieces.
The results come from prototype testing rather than Ethereum mainnet. Developers are considering EIP-8411 for the Hegotá upgrade as Ethereum prepares for larger execution payloads and potentially shorter block times.
Tuned Segmentation Reduces Median Delivery From Five Seconds to 0.75 Seconds
EIP-8411 replaces the single execution-payload gossip message introduced by EIP-7732 with smaller chunks that can propagate separately. Each chunk can be verified and forwarded before a node receives the complete payload.
The benchmark modeled 500 nodes with geographic latency, 50 Mbps upload speeds and 100 Mbps download speeds, using a home-based builder and no high-bandwidth data-center nodes.
Whole-message gossip took about five seconds to reach half of the nodes and roughly six seconds at the tail. The tuned segmented variant reduced median delivery to about 0.75 seconds and tail latency to around one second.
The simpler tier-one design, which combines segmentation with batch publishing using 16 KiB pieces, also brought median propagation below one second, though its tail remained just above one second.
Merkle Proofs Let Nodes Verify Payload Chunks Independently
EIP-8411 adds a Merkle root for the payload chunks to the builder’s execution bid. Each segment includes an inclusion proof, allowing receiving nodes to verify that it belongs to the committed payload without waiting for every other piece.
Researchers found that the basic 16 KiB segmentation-and-batch-publishing design required about one-third more received data than whole-message gossip.
More advanced variants reduced duplicate traffic by changing how nodes announce and request missing pieces. Researchers also tested erasure coding, so nodes could reconstruct a payload without receiving every original segment.
Hegotá Inclusion Remains Undecided After August 6 Deadline
EIP-8411 remains a draft and has not been approved for Ethereum mainnet. Developers requested Proposed for Inclusion status for Hegotá as a replacement for EIP-8142, an earlier approach that would have used Ethereum’s blob data-availability infrastructure to distribute execution payload data.
The request arrived after Hegotá’s Aug. 6 inclusion deadline. Core developers deferred the decision to the Sept. 17 All Core Developers Consensus call because EIP-8411 primarily affects the consensus-layer networking path.
Developers still need to decide whether EIP-8411 enters the Hegotá upgrade before implementation work can move toward mainnet.
