From 16 Minutes to Seconds: A Roadmap to Fast Finality on Ethereum

Transcript

[music] Hello everyone. All right, let's get right into it. So I want to talk to you about a possible road map to fast finality on Ethereum and how we could go from today's 16 minutes to seconds hopefully. So 16 minutes is the time it takes currently approximately for a transaction on Ethereum to be final. But if you look at the straw map, our northstar is we want finality in seconds.

And our current way to get there, you might see the the boxes is the first one decoupled consensus and the second one run finality. So today I want to kind of talk to you a little bit about these and how we can get there. Right? So to reach uh finality in seconds we need to completely rebuild and redesign proof ofstake Ethereum and the first stage and we we don't want to do it that in one go but we'll we'll our goal is to do it in stages and so the first one is decoupled consensus. Now today, as you'll know, kind of the main engine uh at the core of Ethereum is Gasper, and it has LMD Ghost and Casper FFG, but they're really

intertwined protocols. So, our first step is we propose to decouple them and have both the available chain and the finality gadgets run as fast as possible on their own. So this you know if we look at how a visualization of how it could look like today with the with the 16 minutes you see that only the very you know pretty far back you have to go pretty far back to have finalized like dark blue blocks with the couple consensus it could look more something like this where you'll see that many the blocks get finalized uh much faster. If you plot this on a graph where we have the time uh at the bottom and safety, you see that first of all you you get now a fast confirmation

which is already great. But about after about four minutes you get your accountable uh safety or economic security. Now we have an EIP as well. It's 8453 and you know it completely I just want to stress this. It completely overhauls Ethereum consensus and it brings us properties that I think no other blockchain has especially not together and I think we should even we can even be more ambitious and so now looking into the future we can have all these other super nice properties um and so far we've grouped them in you know the keyword one round finality and so what is this second stage so with one round finality in particular what we can

do is we can remove the justification part and instead of justifying we can immediately finalize. So this would look something like this and it would bring us approximately 50% faster time to finality. And of course at the same time we can do even more um upgrades and to safety and to other desirable property for Ethereum. Now if we plot that it would look something like this. So we have faster a faster signal that comes after maybe let's say two minutes maybe hopefully faster in the future but you see that it comes at a slight cost in accountable safety and so today I want to kind of tell you about a new result that I'm pretty excited about and so with this

result what we can do is we add a new box a third box that we can call a safety gadget perhaps it doesn't add any votes or any you know on anything on the networking But it's a new way to think about blocks. Uh and so this is the the paper we've been working on. And so what it adds is these safe blocks. And now if we if we plot that it would look more something like this. So we have actually faster finality but also safer finality which we can get up to 100% economic security which today is limited at 33%.

Uh all of these updates you can I you know we keep up them up to date on finality.watch so you can track them there and you can play around with the different kind of components of the Ethereum consensus. Um also to go to seconds right so far we we're still in the minutes but we can play with networking and with consolidation as Dimma mentioned and shorter slots. So you you'll find all of that in finality.watch and I just want to repeat Dimma's message. You know, one of the main knobs there is consolidation. So, please consolidate.

If you want to know more, we have this workshop at Cambridge. So, you can also scan this QR code and there's 17 hours of talks and this week at at Defcon, you have these also, you know, this more in-depth talk on fast finality that you can check out. That's it from me. I think the future for Ethereum consensus is bright. Thank you very much. Thank you Ian's uh super vivid presentation. Uh anyone has any question? >> Yeah. >> Hello. Hello. So what's the difference between a safe block and a final block?

>> It's just that you have more accountable safety or more economic security behind it. So if there was a if you were ever to reorg a safe block, you know that much more stake would have to be slashed. So maybe you trust it even more. Yeah. Yeah. >> How about this better networking? What does it mean? >> Oh, yeah. So, there's many proposals on how to uh improve networking. The current uh so there's EIP 8334 bundled data stations which is like and many incremental improvements. Um we can also completely redesign the gossip layer which there's a proposal for waggle that's that you might hear about more this week. So there's many things we can we can do there.

>> One last question. >> In your um in your quest for fast finality, what do you think the limit of fast finality? Is it single slot, two slot, three slot? And how long are we talking? >> Yeah, great question. I think so far in our construction because we have these two separate consensus protocols um the limits I think theoretically is two slots right now. So we would in one slot get the confirmation and in the next slot we can get finality. I think this so far is how we see it down the line.

Yeah. >> Thank [music]