Ethereum Validators Confirm Block 25 Million After Nearly 11 Years of Runtime
The distinction matters: the base layer has never fully stopped globally for an extended stretch, but it has experienced some degraded performance, some client failures, and finalization gaps over its history. Under proof-of-stake (PoS), which Ethereum adopted at the Merge in September 2022, the network targets one block every 12 seconds. Before the Merge, under proof-of-work ( ), average block times ran between 13 and 15 seconds. That pace has generated roughly 7,000 blocks per day in recent months, with each block bundling transactions, usage data, base fees, and validator rewards into a cryptographically linked record. Each block proposed under goes through a slot of approximately 12 seconds and reaches finality after two epochs, a process that takes about 15 minutes. Block 25,000,000 followed the same path, finalized by validator consensus without intervention from any central authority. The network‘s size now runs into hundreds of gigabytes, with tens of millions of locked in . ( ) solutions continue to carry a growing share of Ethereum’s transaction , though some networks built on Ethereum have experienced their own clear outages. The development roadmap includes plans for single-slot finality, which would compress the current 15-minute finalization window to a single 12-second slot. Ethereum has processed through