Fast Confirmation Rule: 13 second cofirmations

Transcript

[music] [music] Hey everyone, thanks for sticking around till the end. I think this is the last talk, so I appreciate you guys being here. So, I'm here to talk to you about the fast confirmation rule. It's one of the new consensus rules that Ethereum is rolling out. Roberto here with us as well is one of the developers of it actually. So, if you have any questions for him, that would be great as well. So the fast confirmation rule is a great balance between security and speed. So let me first sketch the problem a little bit. So today it takes for some chains up to 13 minutes to bridge from Ethereum to that chain or to bridge from Ethereum to centralized exchange so that you can offramp your funds. The 13 minutes is

painful for users who are waiting to get their assets unlocked. Um and it could be painful because users want to use applications from the L1 on the L2 and for all of these it could take 13 minutes. Some other chains they have found some ways to speed up and potentially use um faster confirmation times which usually depends on waiting for a few slots. The thing with these um heruristics that are used though is that this is a real security compromise and the fast confirmation rule offers a really great in between something that's extremely extremely secure which I'll tell you a bit about more later while still being extremely fast. So you'll be able to get a confirmation from Ethereum to your L2 within [snorts] 12 or 24 seconds.

So how does fast confirmation rule work exactly? Well, so it brings down your confirmation time from Ethereum to the L2 down to 12 or 24 seconds. And what it does is it gives you the guarantee that any fast confirmed block will with certainty be finalized if the assumptions of the faster information will work. So the assumptions here are that the network is synchronous and that there's no adversary of more than 25% stake. This is slightly different from the assumptions that we have for a finality which is Ethereum's worst case guarantee. the World War II resistance guarantee which works even in an asynchronous network or with an adversary up to 33% stake. But you can see that the differences aren't aren't enormous. And for many applications, the fast confirmation rule will be the

better um use case because it it's much much faster while still being extremely secure. In back tests done by the Ethereum Foundation, we can see that with uh the past year of mainet data, there wouldn't have been a single fast confirm block that would have been reorked. Okay, so how does this work exactly? How can we get such a much better guarantee right now on the protocol? The thing is that we're counting at stations. So attestations are what validators cast on the network to attach their weight to block that they have seen. So they telling you that they've seen this block, they've seen it's valid, it's it's good. Um, and this information has been flowing around the network, but it just hasn't been picked up before. What L tools and exchanges have been using today is waiting for blocks, but blocks

don't actually count towards four choice weights. attestations do the fast confirmation rule counts these attestations in real time on your node for example at the end of the slots and if there are sufficient attestations for the block it fast confirms the block what that means is if there for example 95% of attestations within one slot you can fast confirm a block within one slot looking at the thor chain exploits that happened just a few days ago what they did is they were counting blocks instead of attestations and this could have been prevented if they would have used the fast confirmation rule in fact the block that they were using wasn't fast confirmed. So in that sense the fast confirmation rule doesn't only decrease speed uh sorry increase speed decrease time it also increases security. So for those applications relying on blocks

today which is just a huristic they could change stations and get a more secure protocol and for those waiting for finality today they could change to faster confirmation and get much much faster deposits and better u user experience. So it's always scary to be the first adopter of something especially in this age of of heightened security thresholds. What we're seeing is that this is a real usage that's being used today. So it's integrated into chain link CCIP with 2.0 and it will go live within uh two weeks or so and it's live on Genosis chain today. So your bridge, your chain, your exchange or whatever can use the fast information rule today.

Kosis chain has implemented the faster information rule approximately 28 days ago and they saved their users already 12 uh days of waiting time. So the users coming from Ethereum L1 took nois chain in in bridging. Uh previously they would have waited for finality which would take 13 minutes and now they waited for faster information rule which could go as low as 12 seconds and that delta between the 12 seconds and the 13 minutes times the usage volumes leads to about 12 days over the 28 days that they've been live which is pretty crazy how to adopt it. It's it's really relatively simple. So this is a protocol level feature that the consensus clients uh offer to you. What you'd have to do is either upgrade your node, which just means like switching a flag basically

for the faster information rule, or check that the RPCs that you're using uh serve the faster information rule, which has actually been happening uh recently. Uh and RPCs, there are about four of them who are rolling it out um today uh one and three of them later um in the following weeks. Then what you do is you call the safe block tag. This one exists already today. you have it uh you can call it and that will serve you the fast confirm block and then three enjoy the user experience benefits and see what it can offer for your chain. So you can ask your LLM to offer you the implementation to verify that it is indeed as simple as I've been telling you here. Uh and I'd love to take any questions if there are any. Thanks.

Okay. Uh we have only one question uh and it's uh it makes a lot of sense. Why did attestation count wasn't used earlier? Yeah. Um so attestation count was used before for finality, right? That's sort of obvious. Why it wasn't used earlier is I think um it has a the fast professional has a long history. It's been around for a while. Uh but only recently it's been pushed to mainet thanks to the work of Alberto and thanks to many others. Um, why it wasn't used earlier is actually interesting because the safe block ad I told you like you have it and it exists already today and that's because it was always intended to be used for the fast confirmation rule.

Today we have it. So I don't know let's not threat the the past and let's just use it in the future. That's it. Thanks everyone. Thanks Julian for the presentation and thanks everyone for burying until the end. >> [music]