On Sunday, June 30, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a blog post explaining the road ahead for Ethereum and how they might have to part ways with the epoch-and-slot mechanism of its existing rollup-centric roadmap. Buterin proposes a new SSF mechanism to improve the transaction time latencies of the order of hundreds of milliseconds or even less.

Ethereum Eyes Single-Slot Finality

Currently, the Ethereum Gasper consensus employs a slot-and-epoch mechanism wherein validators cast votes in each 12-second slot. Also, all validators get the opportunity to vote once, over 32 slots.  Later, a PBFT-like consensus algorithm takes care after two epochs (12.8 minutes), thereby providing a strong economic assurance known as finality. However, there are two major concerns with this approach.

1. The complexity and several interaction bugs between the two slot-by-slot voting mechanism as well as the epoch-by-epoch finality mechanism.
2. The 12.8-minute finality period is pretty slow and inconvenient for the users.

To simplify this, Buterin proposes a single-slot finality mechanism similar to the Tendermint consensus, wherein Block-N is finalized even before the creation of Block N+1. The major difference from Tendermint is the retention of the “inactivity leak” mechanism. This will allow the Ethereum blockchain to continue and recover even if nearly one-third of validators go offline. Vitalik Buterin calls this a “Secure Speed Finality” SSF mechanism.

Also Read: Vitalik Buterin Spotlights Innovative Idealist DApps in Web3

Addressing A Few Challenges With the SSF Mechanism

Vitalik Buterin also highlighted some key challenges associated with Single-slot finality (SSF) in the Ethereum ecosystem. He explained that the naive implementation of the SSF would require every Ethereum staker to publish two messages every 12 seconds, imposing a significant load on the Ethereum network. In his blog post, Buterin said:

“While there are clever ideas to mitigate this issue, including the recent Orbit SSF proposal, it remains a challenge. Although SSF significantly improves user experience by accelerating ‘finality,’ it doesn’t eliminate the need for users to wait 5-20 seconds.”

While implementing the SSF mechanism in Ethereum, Buterin suggests implementing Orbit-like techniques in order to reduce the total number of validators signing per slot and address the key goal of lowering 32 ETH minimum staking.

“This approach might cause the slot time to increase to approximately 16 seconds,” added Buterin. However, he added: “Designs like Orbit SSF are very recent, suggesting that the design space of slot-and-epoch designs where something like Orbit SSF is the epoch is still quite under-explored”.

The Ethereum developers are still figuring out the ideal solution in order to improve the finality. Last month, Buterin shared updates made with Ethereum Layer-2 solutions. The Ethereum L2 activity has touched fresh all-time highs recently.

Ethereum is thriving as an ecosystem right now with L2 activity hitting fresh all time highs every other day and the L1 roadmap being executed on with laser precision

Meanwhile, crypto twitter is acting like Ethereum is failing and in dire need of an emergency intervention

— sassal.eth/acc 🦇🔊 (@sassal0x) July 1, 2024

The Ethereum Layer-2 Blast recently announced the launch of its native token and BLAST airdrop.

Also Read: ETH Price Shoots 5% As Whale Activity Spikes Ahead of Ethereum ETF Approval

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Bhushan is a FinTech enthusiast and holds a good flair in understanding financial markets. His interest in economics and finance draw his attention towards the new emerging Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency markets. He is continuously in a learning process and keeps himself motivated by sharing his acquired knowledge. In free time he reads thriller fictions novels and sometimes explore his culinary skills.

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