Abstract

The goal of my project was to explore the research space for single slot finality and provide an academic overview of it in its entirety. Over the past four months, I’ve evaluated 13 consensus mechanisms, 3 approaches, dozens of related concepts and ideas, and spoken with a few of the most prolific researchers tackling this problem. All of this is documented in 60,000+ words of notes that I’ve published here. After this evaluation, I’ve found the most promising approach to achieving SSF, and plan to continue contributing to it by formally establishing how it could be implemented in the Ethereum protocol. The ultimate outcome of my work will be my university Master’s Thesis, titled something along the lines of “Towards Single Slot Finality: An Evaluation of SSF Mechanisms for Ethereum,” and will be completed in February 2024 at the latest.

Published Notes

Include link to updated project doc

• Project abstract and link to the updated project doc with all details (your document in /projects)

Status Report

• Status report about state of the project, overview of roadmap - finished/unfinished tasks, changes of plans, current usability, etc

My initial goal was to spend one month reading all of the material, one month writing and taking deep notes, and the remaining time on contributing a novel mechanism. This was lofty, and it took much longer than expected to both read and write.

The goal of things I wanted to read and write about included:

RLMD-GHOST

LMD-GHOST (with several different modifications)

Goldfish

Tendermint

Algorand

Momose-Ren

Malkhi, Momose, Ren