Vitalik Buterin: Single Slot Finality Mechanism To Boost Ethereum Transaction Speed

Faster transaction confirmation time is one feature that gives blockchain networks a competitive edge over their counterparts. So, developers are constantly researching and exploring various improvement methods in this area.

In a blog post, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a finality mechanism to reduce transaction confirmation latencies on Ethereum. Buterin detailed how switching from Ethereum's current epoch architecture to the Single Slot Finality (SSF) mechanism could enhance transaction speed.

Ethereum Considers Single-Slot Finality

In his blog post, Buterin outlined the roadmap to implementing this new idea and potential challenges. While Ethereum's Gasper consensus mechanism finalizes transactions in about 12.8 minutes, Buterin says implementing SSF could improve transaction time to hundreds of milliseconds.

The Gasper consensus uses a slot-and-epoch finality mechanism, which requires validators to cast votes on-chain every 12-second slot. The validators can only vote once over 32 slots, which takes 6.4 minutes.

Afterward, the votes are interpreted as messages in a PBFT-like consensus algorithm to give a finality after two epochs. The entire process takes approximately 12.8 minutes.

Buterin acknowledges that nearly 13 minutes is too long for anyone to wait before confirming their transaction. This latency is a significant drawback of using the Gasper consensus mechanism.

Moreover, the slot-by-slog and epoch-by-epoch finality framework is complex, with several bug interactions.

Therefore, Buterin proposes implementing a single-slot finality (SSF) mechanism to simplify the transaction confirmation process. The Ethereum co-founder explained that SSF works like the Tendermint consensus model, where one block is finalized before creating the next block, making the process faster.

Such a progressive consensus mechanism will secure Ethereum's speed and efficiency, allowing it to continue working even if some validators go offline. Buterin tags this SSF mechanism as Secure Speed Finality.

Key Challenge Associated with the SSF Mechanism

While SSF has several advantages, it also has its challenges. In his blog post, Buterin highlighted a key challenge of implementing single-slot finality on Ethereum.

He noted that naively implementing SSF means every Ethereum staker must publish two messages every 12 seconds. Such a practice will impose a significant load on the blockchain, which it may find difficult to handle.

Buterin suggested implementing Orbit-like SSF techniques to mitigate the challenges. This approach will help reduce the number of validators required to sign each slot, lowering the 32 ETH staking threshold.

While this design could speed up finality, users still need to wait 5-20 seconds, making it an imperfect solution.

Buterin wrote: There are clever ideas for how to mitigate this, including the very recent orbit SSF proposal. But even still, while it improves US significantly by making finality come faster, it doesn't change the fact that users need to wait 5-20 seconds."

However, Buterin noted that Orbit SSF techniques are still very novel. So, slot-and-epoch consensus designs in which Orbit SSF is the epoch remain underexplored.

There's still no best way to approach this concern, and developers are still trying to find the ideal solution to enhance transaction finality.

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