The Dark Forest Era

For most of Ethereum’s history, block time has been treated as immutable. Every 12 seconds, the Ethereum blockchain advances to its next block, where state updates happen and transactions finalize. Everything that happens in between is effectively dark. The mempool is an environment where every transaction is a signal, every signal is watched, and every action assumes an adversary on the other side.

For users, this feels like they have to broadcast their intentions and wait, hoping that ordering, inclusion, and execution resolve in their favor. While this model worked when Ethereum was small, it does not scale to a world where payments, trading, and real-world financial activity increasingly live onchain.

For Ethereum applications to support real-time markets and real-world activity at scale, execution itself must become real time.

Splitting the Block and Realtime Ethereum

What we’ve done is split the atom of Ethereum blocks.

Realtime Ethereum starts with a simple realization: blocks do not need to be treated as indivisible, 12-second events. By breaking Ethereum blocks into sub-blocks as fast as 50–100 milliseconds, without changing consensus or security guarantees, Ethereum can move from discrete execution to continuous execution.

ETHGas enables this by turning blockspace into a tradeable asset. Each of these sub-blocks can be bought in advance, traded, and sequence it deliberately on ETHGas’ blockspace marketplace.

The result is that instead of extracting value through opaque mempool games that lead to the MEV problem, formalized markets where sequencing rights are purchased and blockspace is allocated explicitly. Here, competition moves upstream and the Ethereum mempool turns into a clearly mapped and navigable forest.

From the user’s perspective, Ethereum stops behaving like a snapshot machine and starts behaving like a live system. This means their transactions can be instant, certain, and fair.

From an application’s perspective, Realtime Ethereum is deliberately simple. Most apps can benefit by pointing to a Realtime-aware RPC endpoint. This simplicity is important because realtime execution should feel invisible to end users and effortless for developers.

From the protocol’s perspective, nothing fundamental changes. Consensus remains intact. Final blocks are still proposed and validated through the standard PBS pipeline. What changes is how execution is produced and surfaced before finalization.

Realtime Ethereum collapses the gap between intent and execution, turning hidden extraction into explicit markets, and making guarantees visible in real time.

It’s Not Theoretical, Realtime Blocks Work in Practice

The first Realtime Blocks were produced on Ethereum mainnet on November 15, 2025, demonstrating that this model is not theoretical. In one representative block:

• Block: 23788705
  
  
• Available build window: 6,703 ms
  
  
• Realtime sub-blocks built: 44
  
  
• Average sub-block time: 152 ms
  
  
• Total transactions included: 71

The result is execution that is 240 times faster than Ethereum today, faster than most L2s, and competitive with the highest-throughput monolithic chains, all while remaining on Ethereum mainnet.

Realtime Ethereum is Plug and Play

Integration is straightforward, designed to be fast and low friction with most apps benefiting from minimal code changes.

In production, simply point your app to a Realtime-aware RPC endpoint from your provider of choice. If your provider doesn't support Realtime yet, let us know on Discord and we'll work to get them added. Alternatively, you can run your own Realtime-aware node using ETHGas's reth image: https://github.com/ethgas-developer/ethgas-reth

For a more in-depth guide on how to plug Realtime Ethereum into your application, see the docs.
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What Comes Next

Ethereum’s dominance has always come from credibility: decentralization, security, and economic gravity. Realtime Ethereum adds performance without sacrificing any of those properties.

By turning execution into a continuous, guaranteed, market-driven process, Ethereum moves beyond the Dark Forest era and into something more mature: a system where intent can be expressed safely, outcomes are predictable, and blockspace is treated as the critical resource it truly is.

Realtime Ethereum is already supported by over 4% of Ethereum validators and more than $800M in blockspace commitments. Soon, it will continue to scale with increased blockspace capacity post-Fusaka and deeper collaboration with applications that benefit most, including DEXs and trading venues.

The Ethereum block has been split, and the mempool is now a fair and formalized marketplace. Ethereum’s Realtime Era has begun.

For Builders: Explore our developer documentation to learn how to get started.

For Researchers: Read our full research paper and join the discussion shaping Realtime Ethereum.

For Everyone: Follow ETHGas on X for research updates and ongoing progress.

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