Ethereum researchers have filed a new draft proposal aiming to cut the time it takes for Ethereum transactions to become final from approximately 16 minutes to roughly four minutes. This change could lower the cost for money transfer services that currently tie up capital while waiting for customer payments to clear on the Ethereum network. The proposal, filed by Ben Edgington, Francesco D’Amato, Roberto Saltini, Yann Vonlanthen, and Mikhail Kalinin, seeks a fourfold improvement in finality speed, though the design is still unfinished and has no activation date. A shorter finality time would allow services to reuse their capital sooner, reducing operational costs. For example, a service fronting $1 million an hour would see tied-up capital drop from $267,000 to about $67,000. The proposal also aims to facilitate future upgrades to quantum-resistant signatures. However, even at four minutes, Ethereum's finality would still be slower than Solana's, which achieved about 150 milliseconds with its Alpenglow upgrade.