Ethereum is currently one of the largest smart contract platforms, and its blockchain network uses a consensus mechanism to verify and add new transactions and blocks. In the past, the consensus algorithm used by Ethereum was Proof of Work (PoW). Since Ethereum switched from POW to POS verification mechanism, there are approximately 285,000 validators, and 32 ETH can be deposited into the account to participate in the pledge. Currently, Ethereum blocks require 64 to 95 slots (about 15 minutes) to achieve finality, which is far from the timely and high speed of real-life financial services.
Ethereum's consensus protocol is a hybrid protocol that combines the "available protocol" LMD-GHOST with the final gadget Casper-FFG and performs view merging without sub-sampling, i.e. when we allow everyone to vote at the same time, Rather than cycling through multiple committees (the latter is what happens in the current agreement). Having everyone vote at the same time is an important part of Single Period Final (SSF) research, so we thought it was worth exploring all the benefits it offers. We will see that everyone voting immediately will eliminate the fundamental problems of LMD-GHOST, leaving a secure protocol with extremely desirable properties.
But hybrid consensus mechanisms actually have many unavoidable problems, namely that most users are unwilling to wait 15 minutes for transactions to be finalized. Currently, even exchanges typically consider deposits to be "finalized" after 12 to 20 confirmations (about 3 to 5 minutes), even though the security guarantees provided by 12 to 20 PoW confirmations are also weak (compared to true PoS finalization). But single-slot finality will provide very high security at a speed that users are increasingly accustomed to expect.
How to achieve single-slot finality?
In fact, moving to single-slot confirmation is a multi-year roadmap. Even if significant development work begins soon, it will be one of the major changes added to Ethereum later, long after proof-of-stake, sharding, and Verkle trees are fully rolled out. In general, the implementation path is roughly as follows:
1. Step up work on optimizing proof aggregation. This is an important problem anyway as the number of validators is expected to increase. Regardless of what we do for any of the other steps, we need to put more focused research and development work on this problem.
2. Agree on general parameters: What size super committee are we aiming for (or the super committee is the set of all active validators, we implement some different mechanisms to control how many active validators there can be)? What level of overhead are we happy with, and what techniques will we use to reduce overhead?
3. Research, agree upon, and specify an ideal consensus and fork choice mechanism to achieve single-slot finality. This would combine a BFT consensus mechanism (Casper FFG or something more traditional) with a fork choice rule that is only relevant if >= 1/3 of validators are offline.
4. Agree and execute on the implementation path. This may be multi-step, with one step introducing the super committee mechanism, and the next step adding completely new consensus and aggregation mechanisms.
The ultimate benefits will be significant, and the technology can be improved over time to achieve other benefits not described here (e.g., using an increased maximum number of validators to reduce minimum deposit size). Therefore, it is worth starting deeper and more focused research and development on the technical challenges described in this paper as soon as possible.
What projects are working on achieving single slot finality?
Currently, the most authoritative and project with the greatest advantages is SSFINALITY, which has great highlights.
SSF, the full name of Single slot Finality, is a single-slot blockchain operating platform. It has a huge blockchain ecosystem and will end the hybrid chain state. It independently builds the SBFT language and uses the LMD Ghost fork algorithm to select the main chain. It uses Casper FFG to finalize the checkpoint. Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget's voting on the shard chain state (Crosslink) uses the deep participation of FORK, and short-term improvements in fork selection (such as view-merge) may also have an impact on the work of SSF fork selection; aggregate work 6426 committees 256 verifications and 16 designated aggregators, and each of them combines all the signatures they see to form an aggregate signature (96 bytes + 256 bit fields). At the same time, the fork choice patch is merged with the view in a timely manner, which perfectly completes the security issues after the speed increase and solves the improvement of Ethereum transmission from 15 minutes to 16 seconds!
The SSFINALITY project is valued at 2 billion US dollars. You can check the official media and find that the A round of financing has successively obtained investments of nearly 6 senior capitals totaling 17 million US dollars for the development of GAMEFI DEX and other ecosystems, including the old American hedge fund Tiger Fund, Binance investment project DODO CRYPTO, and Binance's early investment institution Black Hole Crypto, Black Hole Capital, Coinmaketcap's investment institution LXID FINANCE, Cosmos' investment institution North Venture and AXS's investment institution BT LABS, etc.
SSFINALITY's strength should not be underestimated and will surely attract market praise. You can pay close attention to the progress of the project. At the same time, the SSF currency exchange and smart price display functions have been launched before 9 am on December 6th. Please pay attention and participate.
