1. Impact on DEX Trading Volume 📈

• Lower Latency: A 1-sec slot would significantly reduce transaction confirmation times —>

  • Enhancing the trading experience by near-instantaneous executions
  • Encouraging HFT strategies and potentially increasing trading volume

• Reduced MEV Opportunities:

  <aside> 📖

  MEV: It refers to validator profit extracted by selecting, including, excluding, and ordering transactions in a block (front-running, sandwich attack, liquidations, etc…). Searchers have 12 seconds to observe transactions and prioritize the most profitable such as large transactions that would lead to price slippage (and then profit)

  </aside>

  Faster Block Times →

  • The window for validators to observe the mempool before managing transactions shrinks
  • Less opportunity to prioritize transactions to make the same profits that searchers/validators used to do
  • Fewer MEV opportunities → Force validators to rely more on standard block rewards (tx fees) than exploiting transaction orders. That might discourage searchers from one side but the overall benefits can compensate for the reduction in MEV opportunities (discussed later)

• Increased Arbitrage Opportunities

  Lower Latency → Faster Trades →

  • More time to explore price discrepancies: Arbitrage thrives in environments where price divergencies exist between exchanges and markets. 12s blocks can delay the execution of trades and allow the price differences to close before traders act
  • 1s block time makes executions faster and allows traders to capitalize on smaller price discrepancies across LPs and DEX (maybe across chains)
  • More frequent Blockcspace Auctions → Each individual opportunity may be small but more frequent auctions increase the overall number of opportunities available to arbitrage traders
  • More high-frequency traders who need to execute many small arbitrage trades within a short period → higher overall volume
  • → More liquidity is required to accommodate the higher trading volume —> Higher demand for DEX liquidity

2. Comparison to Other Chains ⛓️

Other chains have been outperforming Ethereum in terms of trading volume generated:

Ethereum vs Solana: https://dune.com/queries/3353700/5621934

Ethereum vs EVMs: https://dune.com/queries/4477869

Solana achieves block times of ˜400 ms on average and the average block time for BNB is 3s , enabling high-frequency trades and capturing a significant share of DEX trading volume. Let's check the DEX stats across some chains networks: