The field of Single Slot Finality (SSF) is at an important juncture. As the demands on Ethereum grow, there's an evident need for faster and more efficient consensus mechanisms. SSF offers a solution to this challenge by aiming for near-instantaneous transaction verifications that provide a better user experience, MEV-incentivized reorg prevention, and provable liveness, among other benefits.
However, even with its clear potential, the full integration of SSF into mainnet remains a mid to long-term goal. Currently, several consensus mechanisms and innovations are under exploration to achieve SSF, reflecting the active research and development in this area.
My project’s objective is to provide a clear and clear and concise overview of the present state of SSF research, highlighting the key developments and potential avenues, as well as contributing meaningfully to advancing this research.
This project will, in conjunction with my Master’s thesis, provide an academic overview of the entire single slot finality consensus mechanism space. It will detail the current consensus mechanisms that achieve or are progressing towards achieving SSF, the designs and innovations that made them possible, their pros and cons, and their feasibility as an Ethereum LMD-GHOST replacement. Additionally, it will attempt to further the research space by both modifying existing mechanisms with design features from others to create new consensus mechanisms with different sets of tradeoffs as well as propose research questions to be answered in future works.
To elaborate on the Master’s Thesis:
How will you implement your solutions? Give details and more technical information on the project.
I plan to implement my solution in my Master’s Thesis, titled something along the lines of “A comprehensive overview of blockchain consensus mechanisms emphasizing single slot finality.” The paper will be broken down like most academic theses, with an introduction into the problems, a background information/pre-requisite knowledge section to make the SSF space approachable, an overview of the several different approaches, mechanisms, and proposals used to advance towards SSF, and analysis and discussion of these topics. Finally, it will show attempts to create new consensus mechanisms with different sets of tradeoffs by building upon prior works. The conclusion will elaborate on open research questions and the future state of the space.
Some of the consensus mechanisms that will be evaluated and analyzed include:
RLMD-GHOST
LMD-GHOST (with several different modifications)