Arbitrum One Replaced Timeboost With Priority Gas Auctions
The network shifted its transaction ordering model to competitive bidding rounds following a governance vote.
Updated on Sept. 24, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence
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Arbitrum One has officially replaced its Timeboost transaction ordering system with Priority Gas Auctions. This transition marks the end of a 17-month period for Timeboost and follows an onchain Constitutional AIP vote passed in June 2026.
Why it matters
The migration to competitive fee-based ordering aims to refine transaction sequencing for decentralized finance protocols. This adjustment moves the network toward a bidding-based model that explicitly prioritizes transactions based on user-defined priority fees.
The system utilizes 125-millisecond bidding rounds within 250-millisecond network blocks, replacing the former Timeboost model. Developers also launched the Fast Feed service, with revenue split 97% to the Arbitrum DAO Treasury and 3% to the Arbitrum Developer Guild.
The players
Arbitrum One
An Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that utilizes optimistic rollups to increase throughput and reduce transaction costs.
Arbitrum DAO
The decentralized autonomous organization that governs the Arbitrum network through onchain voting and treasury management.
Arbitrum Developer Guild
A group of core software engineers and contributors dedicated to the development and maintenance of the Arbitrum protocol.
The details
Under the new Priority Gas Auctions system, users compete for execution priority by setting a maxPriorityFeePerGas—a specific variable that dictates the maximum extra fee a user is willing to pay to have their transaction processed first. This replaces Timeboost, which had served as the network's sequencing mechanism for 17 months. Simultaneously, the platform launched Fast Feed, a paid data subscription that provides subscribers with ordered transaction data before it appears on the standard sequencer feed.
Timeline
April 2025: The Timeboost transaction ordering system originally launched.
June 2026: An onchain Constitutional AIP vote approved the transition.
September 24, 2026: The Priority Gas Auctions system went live.
The Tech Race
This transition aligns Arbitrum with competitive market-based sequencing models increasingly adopted by Ethereum-based scaling solutions. It follows the precedent established by the Arbitrum Constitutional AIP framework, which requires formal onchain consensus for major protocol modifications.
Users seeking faster transaction execution on Arbitrum One must now utilize the maxPriorityFeePerGas parameter to participate in bidding rounds. The change alters the cost structure for time-sensitive transactions while simultaneously enabling institutional access to data via the new Fast Feed service.
The takeaway
The move to Priority Gas Auctions centralizes transaction priority around user bidding rather than the previous fixed-time system. Watch for future performance benchmarks comparing the 125-millisecond bidding speed against the historical latency of the discontinued Timeboost model.
Further reading
For more on the latest changes to network infrastructure and sequencing, visit the Artificial Intelligence section.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Crypto Briefing.
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