A proposal to cut Ethereum's block times gained institutional support this week when Ethereum Institutional, a group representing large asset managers and infrastructure providers active on the network, backed Ethlabs' EIP-8198. The proposal is designed to shorten the roughly 12-second gap between Ethereum blocks, a figure that has stayed largely unchanged since the network's move to proof of stake and has become a competitive disadvantage against faster chains that produce blocks in a fraction of a second.