On this day, 30th of June, 2024, a new groundbreaking is likely to be unveiled by Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum. Rather than continuing to focus on rollups, which was previously discussed in the Buterin’s SSF Roadmap, Buterin described the idea in a very elaborate blog post. This new approach or known as Single-Slot Finality (SSF) mechanism is expected to significantly enhance the operation time of the transactions and also reduce complex consensus mechanism of Ethereum.
Ethereum Eyes Single-Slot Finality
Ethereum at the moment employs a Gasper consensus model, and it mainly utilizes a slot-and-epoch basis for the transactionality. Here, validators vote in a 12 second timeframe, and vote once in 32 intervals. This approach, in essence, ends in finality after two epochs, that is, after round about 12. 8 minutes.
While effective, this system has two primary issues:
- Complexity: The level of complexity around slot-by-slot and epoch-by-epoch makes it possible to get bugs.
- Latency: The finality period also should be set to 12. 8 minutes duration is quite unproductive to the users who want to get the transaction confirmed as soon as possible.
These issues are the rationale for Buterin’s new single-slot finality to finalize a block before the creation of the following one. Again, in contrast to Tendermint, Ethereum’s SSF will maintain the “inactivity leak” that would keep the network operational even if 1/3 of validators become offline.
Challenges with Implementing SSF
However, Buterin also lists a few concerning in implementing SSF: However, the most important is the burden it puts on the total communication of the network. A naive SSF implementation would mean that every staker in Ethereum would send two messages every 12 seconds. This would put a lot of pressure to the network.
Mitigating Network Load
To deal with this issue Buterin proposed the use of Orbit-like techniques. These techniques focus on cutting down the number of validators that signal per slot, which may extend the slot time to about 16 seconds. This could not eliminate the waiting period but at the same time, could decrease the amount that users need to stake as a minimum from the current 32 ETH.
Looking Ahead
The Ethereum developers are still working on the optimisation approaches of the finality of layers as well as the overall operation of the network. For example, Buterin distinguished Orbit SSF design, which is still at a very early stage, while the number of possibilities is enormous. Ethereum Layer-2 solutions on the other hand are gradually improving with Layer-2 rollups setting new record high activity.
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