Future Improvements of the Ethereum Attestation System

Since Ethereum successfully transitioned to attestation, the system has performed excellently in terms of stability, performance, and decentralization. However, there are still some important areas that need further improvement. This article will discuss possible directions for improvement in the design of attestation technology, including single-slot finality, lowering staking thresholds, and faster transaction confirmations.

Single-slot finality and staking democratization

Currently, Ethereum requires about 15 minutes to achieve final confirmation of a block, and the minimum staking threshold is 32 ETH. Ideally, we hope to achieve final confirmation within approximately 12 seconds in a single time slot ( and reduce the staking threshold to 1 ETH. This will enhance security, simplify the protocol, and support more individual stakers to participate.

Several possible solutions to achieve this goal include:

1. Develop more efficient signature aggregation protocols, such as using ZK-SNARKs.
2. Orbit committee mechanism, which confirms the chain through randomly selecting a medium-sized committee.
3. Two-layer staking mechanism, dividing stakers into high deposit and low deposit categories.

These solutions have their pros and cons, and it is necessary to weigh factors such as economic finality, degree of decentralization, and node operation costs.

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Single Secret Leader Election

The current block proposer is known in advance, which poses a risk of DoS attacks. The single secret leader election )SSLE( protocol uses cryptographic technology to conceal the information of the next block proposer until the block is actually generated.

The main challenge of the SSLE protocol currently is how to achieve it without excessively increasing the complexity of the protocol. The marginal complexity of SSLE may only be reduced to an acceptable level when Ethereum introduces a universal zero-knowledge proof mechanism for other reasons.

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Faster transaction confirmation

Reducing the transaction confirmation time from around 12 seconds to about 4 seconds will significantly improve the user experience. There are mainly two technical routes:

1. Shorten the time slot to 8 seconds or 4 seconds
2. Allow proposers to publish pre-confirmations during the time slot process.

Shortening the slot time may increase the risk of validator centralization. The pre-confirmation method can improve the average confirmation time, but it cannot improve the worst-case confirmation time.

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Other Research Directions

• 51% Attack Recovery: Reduce reliance on the social layer and automate the recovery process as much as possible.
• Raise the final confirmation threshold: increase from the current 67% to 80% to enhance security.
• Quantum resistance: Develop alternatives based on hash or other quantum resistance for the elliptic curve-dependent protocol parts.

These improvements will further enhance the security, efficiency, and decentralization of the Ethereum attestation system, but each improvement requires weighing various factors and necessitates ongoing discussion and research within the community.

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