Ethereum Breaks the Millisecond Barrier — Primev’s FAST RPC Redefines Mainnet Speed

Ethereum, long seen as the steady but methodical workhorse of the blockchain world, has just been pushed to a speed once thought impossible. The infrastructure platform Primev has introduced a new remote-procedure-call system — FAST RPC — that enables transaction preconfirmations in under 200 milliseconds.

In practical terms, that means sending Ether, minting NFTs, or interacting with a smart contract could soon feel instantaneous.

The Promise of “Millisecond Ethereum”

Preconfirmation is an early commitment from a block builder that a given transaction will be included in the next block. It doesn’t replace finality but narrows the psychological and technical gap between “click” and “confirmation.”

Primev’s FAST RPC does exactly this: it sends a preconfirmation signal within 200 ms, before the block is even mined. In live tests, founder Murat Akdeniz demonstrated a MetaMask transfer that was preconfirmed in 377 ms and finalized in the same block.

From a user’s perspective, Ethereum’s block times — which average around 12 seconds — suddenly feel closer to those of high-velocity L1s like Sui or Solana.

For an ecosystem often accused of being too slow for real-time applications, the implications are profound: instant trades, NFT minting without lag, on-chain gaming, and low-latency dApp interactions all become feasible without leaving the mainnet.

How FAST RPC Works

An RPC (remote procedure call) is the channel through which wallets and dApps communicate with blockchain nodes. When a user initiates a transaction, the RPC transmits it to a node, which propagates it across the network.

FAST RPC optimizes this process by building a direct preconfirmation handshake between the wallet and a participating builder or validator. The system then locks that transaction’s inclusion order in milliseconds.

Crucially, this doesn’t require altering Ethereum’s consensus layer. FAST RPC functions as a network-level accelerator— an opt-in parallel mechanism compatible with MetaMask, WalletConnect, and other major wallets.

Bridging Speed Without Abandoning Mainnet

Until now, developers seeking faster execution typically moved to Layer-2 rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, Base) or alternative L1 chains. Primev’s approach is more subtle: it attempts to “supercharge” mainnet performance itself, making the Ethereum base layer competitive with newer networks on speed while retaining its unmatched security and liquidity depth.

Akdeniz’s team has reportedly spent over two years fine-tuning the system to achieve this latency reduction. “We wanted to show that Ethereum doesn’t have to compromise decentralization to feel fast,” he said in a post accompanying the demonstration.

Caveats: Scale, Security, and Centralization

However, FAST RPC is not yet battle-tested. By comparison, the dominant RPC providers — Infura (owned by ConsenSys) and Alchemy — handle billions of calls per day, serving over 400 000 developers and processing an estimated $150 billion in transactions annually.

Their global node infrastructure has weathered market surges, DDoS attacks, and congestion events that no smaller network has yet faced.

FAST RPC, while promising, will have to prove:

Resilience under load — whether sub-second confirmations hold when millions of requests hit simultaneously.

Economic fairness — whether preconfirmation introduces any risk of preferential inclusion or front-running.

Infrastructure decentralization — if adoption concentrates around Primev’s servers, it could ironically recreate the centralization Ethereum seeks to avoid.

Integration: From MetaMask to Mainstream

For early adopters, setup is straightforward. Users can connect via MetaMask or WalletConnect and replace their existing Infura or Alchemy endpoint with Primev’s. A deposit into Primev’s “gas tank” smart contract (at address 0x24A…c2ACf) covers transaction costs on the network.

This model offers a hybrid approach: end-users get speed and predictability, while maintaining full self-custody of their assets.

The Broader Context

Ethereum’s scaling roadmap — encompassing EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding), rollup compression, and MEV supply-chain optimization — aims to achieve scalability through protocol upgrades. FAST RPC sits orthogonally to these efforts: a user-experience innovation, not a protocol change.

It demonstrates how private-sector infrastructure can complement Ethereum’s public-layer roadmap, filling the UX gap before the next wave of consensus upgrades lands.

If the system holds under stress and avoids centralization traps, FAST RPC could redefine user expectations for Ethereum — proving that the world’s largest smart-contract network can, in fact, move at the speed of light.

Source: Cointelegraph — “‘Millisecond’ Preconfirmations Make It to Ethereum via New RPC” (October 23, 2025)