Potential Improvement Directions for the Ethereum Attestation System

The attestation system ( PoS ) has been running stably on Ethereum for nearly two years, but there are still some important areas that need improvement. This article will focus on the areas in the technical design of attestation that can be improved, as well as possible ways to implement these improvements.

Single Slot Finality and Staking Democratization

Currently, Ethereum takes about 15 minutes to complete a block, and a minimum of 32 ETH is required to become a staker. We hope to improve the situation in the following two aspects:

• Finalize block ( within a time slot of about 12 seconds )
• Allow staking with 1 Ether

The main challenge in achieving these goals is how to maintain low node operating costs when the number of validators is very large. Currently, there are several possible solutions:

1. Brute Force: Develop more advanced signature aggregation protocols, possibly using ZK-SNARKs technology.

2. Orbit Committee: Introduce a randomly selected medium-sized committee responsible for final determination while retaining economic finality.

3. Two-tier staking: Stakers are divided into high and low tiers, with only the high tier directly participating in providing economic finality.

These schemes have their own advantages and disadvantages, and require further research and consideration.

Single Secret Leader Election

Currently, the order of block proposals from validators is predetermined, which may lead to DoS attacks. The Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE) protocol hides the next block proposer through cryptographic techniques, which can solve this problem.

However, the SSLE protocol will significantly increase system complexity and may need to wait until other zero-knowledge proof mechanisms are introduced in the Ethereum protocol before considering implementation.

Faster Transaction Confirmation

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

• Reduce the time slot to 4-8 seconds
• Allow proposers to publish pre-confirmation during the time slot process.

However, these solutions face some technical and incentive challenges that need further consideration.

Other Research Directions

• 51% attack recovery: automate the recovery process as much as possible to reduce reliance on the social layer.
• Increase the required validator support ratio for finalization, such as raising it from 67% to 80%.
• Enhance the system's resistance to quantum computing.

Overall, the Ethereum PoS system still has a lot of room for improvement and needs to constantly seek a balance between security, decentralization, and performance.