Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, published "A way to go deep into the slot-and-epoch architecture to provide Ethereum users with faster transaction confirmation times". The article states that while transaction confirmation times on Ethereum L1 have been reduced to 5-20 seconds compared to five years ago, thanks to EIP-1559 and the merged stable block time, which is comparable to the credit card payment experience, further reduction in latency is still valuable, especially for applications that require hundreds of milliseconds or less. In the paper, Buterin describes the practical options that Ethereum has explored to speed up transaction confirmation, with a focus on single-slot finality in existing technologies. Currently, Ethereum's Gasper consensus mechanism uses a slot-and-epoch architecture, but this mechanism is complex and the finality confirmation time is too long (12.8 minutes). SSF uses a Tendermint-like mechanism to terminate blocks before the next block is generated, while retaining an inactive leak mechanism to ensure the stable operation and resilience of the chain. The main challenge of SSF is that it places a lot of load on the chain, but new proposals such as Orbit SSF are working to alleviate this problem. In addition, the paper also discusses rollup pre-confirmation and pre-confirmation-based mechanisms. Buterin emphasizes that the slot-and-epoch architecture is clearly correct, but not all slot-and-epoch architectures are created equal. He advocates a more comprehensive exploration of the design space, especially those with a stronger separation of concerns between the two mechanisms, in order to reduce transaction confirmation time and improve user experience.