A huge boost is expected for the Ethereum network, as the project’s co-founder and cryptocurrency enthusiast Vitalik Buterin has revealed a new feature of the Ethereum blockchain that promises to dramatically speed up transaction confirmation times. The new Single Slot Finality (SSF) feature has the potential to make Ethereum transactions highly instantaneous, streamlining the process of building consensus on the network.
Ethereum Network Transactions Get Major Upgrade
As Ethereum continues to grow, Vitalik ButerinThe announcement emphasizes continued efforts to address efficiency and scalability issues. The debut of Single Slot Finality (SSF) is a critical step in improving the network’s ability to process more transactions quickly and securely.
Buterin revealed the latest innovative solution in a blog post titled “Epoches and Time Slots All the Way Down: Ways to Offer Ethereum Users Faster Transaction Confirmation Times.”
Currently, EthereumGasper consensus uses a slotted and epoch architecture. With this system, a subset of validators can broadcast a vote on the head of the chain every 12 seconds, and all validators have 32 slots (6.4 minutes) to vote. After two epochs (12.8 min), these votes are reinterpreted as messages in a consensus mechanism that resembles PBFT and provides a strong economic guarantee known as finality.
Due to the slowness of the current procedure, users have become increasingly uncomfortable with it in recent years. Indeed, the slot-by-slot voting method and the epoch-by-epoch finality mechanism are complex and often have interaction flaws. Moreover, 12.8 minutes is an excessively long delay, as no one is interested in waiting that long.
However, with the introduction of single-slot finality, this is all about to change, as the SSF will replace this approach with a process more akin to the Tendermint consensus where block N is finalized before block N+1 is created. The main difference with Tendermint is that users can maintain the “inactivity leak” method, which keeps the chain alive and helps it recover in the event that more than a third of validators go offline.
Although the new feature promises fast transaction time for the Ethereum NetworkThere are also challenges it could face. Using the initiative ignorantly would suggest that each Ethereum staker would have to publish two messages every 12 seconds, which could put a huge load on the chain.
Two separate pre-confirmation systems
According to the blog post, the SSF functionality boasts of two distinct approaches which include rollup preconfirmations and based preconfirmations.
Rollup confirmations are generating a division of concerns within the Ethereum ecosystem. As a result, ETH’s Layer 1 solutions will focus on censorship resistance, reliability, stability, and preserving and improving a specific core of features, while Layer 2 solutions will focus on engaging directly with users by making different technological and cultural tradeoffs.
Meanwhile, the pre-confirmation based strategy assumes that ETH Proposers will become highly skilled players in the field of electric motor vehicles. By offering incentives to these experienced proposers to take on the task of offering pre-confirmations as a service, the approach capitalizes on this expertise.
Featured image from Adobe Stock, chart from Tradingview.com
