Hello!
I spent the last two weeks writing consensus mechanism overviews for the majority of the protocols that I reviewed. Specifically, I have 500-1500-word writeups on Goldfish, RLMD-GHOST, Tendermint, Algorand, and Avalanche.
Here’s an example of the most comprehensive
and here’s the least comprehensive
Additionally, I did a deep dive into EigenLayer and the potential for a SSF protocol to be built as a re-staking service. I spoke with one of their research leads about the topic, and we agreed that SSF is a lofty goal for EigenLayer and that it is better suited for fast finality. For SSF to be successful, it would need a vast majority of re-staked Ethereum dedicated to it, otherwise it’d be impossible for the staked ETH to have any influence over the canonical chain. They may say they won’t build unless a certain block or transaction is included, but this would result in an inactivity leak if allowed to go on for long enough. On the other hand, if they break their promise, they could be subject to EigenLayer slashing. Here’s my writeup on it:
With DevConnect drawing ever closer, I plan to spend these next 2 weeks finalizing things that I can present on, like an evaluation of all these protocols to see which ones are best-suited for SSF, open research questions, what still needs to be done, etc. As I’ve previously mentioned, I intend to continue working on this project well beyond the end of the Protocol Fellowship, at least until next February or March.