The Ethereum community has released EIP-8141, a proposal to speed up payload propagation through message segmentation. According to Foresight News, the proposal would let segments stream across the network instead of using store-and-forward at each hop.

The proposal says the Merkle tree commitment included in the bid is the only required consensus change, and each segment would be verified against that commitment before forwarding. It adds that segmentation and batch publishing could reduce median delivery time from 5 seconds for the full payload to under 1 second, even in baseline home builder simulations without data center nodes.