Hi everyone! I’ve finished the reading and research portion of my project and have moved into writing the thesis. So far, I have a draft of the abstract, a bit of the intro, and a portion of the background knowledge completed. My plan for this week is to finish the background knowledge as well as the desirable traits for SSF. After this week, I’m not sure if I want to continue writing or devote some time to coming up with new protocols. On one hand, it makes sense to devote the time to developing new stuff now so I can center my thesis around the developments, but on the other I’d like to have a greater knowledge of the existing research and literature before diving into it myself, and writing would give me that pre-requisite knowledge. Still up in the air, and maybe I’ll spend one week trying the new development approach and go back to writing if I don’t like it.

I also briefly emailed with Joachim Neu, an influential consensus researcher who’s been the author of a lot of the papers I’ve read. He gave me some great resources to look at as well as some information about the responsiveness trait (in perfect network conditions we can come to consensus faster than the network delay upper bound), which isn’t currently in Goldfish or RLMD-GHOST but may, in theory, be possible to add. That’s certainly something I’m going to look into, as it’d be a great way for me to contribute to those protocols in a tangible way.

Here’s a more detailed list of what I’ve written so far:

Abstract

Background Knowledge

Byzantine Fault Tolerance

PBFT

Nakamoto Consensus/dynamic availability

Here’s what I’m hoping to do this week:

Background knowledge (finish)

State machine replication

Characteristics/properties

Availability-finality dilemma

Sleepy model

Synchrony Assumptions

Atomic broadcast protocol

Gasper

LMD-GHOST

Casper

Potential Attacks

Reorg Resilience

Desired SSF Traits

Reasons for SSF (MEV, reorg resilience, etc.)

Asynchrony tolerance

Dynamic participation

Subsampling

Below, I’ve attached my abstract draft to give an idea of where things are going:

This thesis addresses the pressing need for faster finality in blockchain consensus mechanisms with an emphasis on the Ethereum blockchain, whose Gasper consensus protocol currently requires between 64 and 95 slots to achieve economic finality. Despite its strengths in dynamic participation and asynchrony resilience, Gasper's delayed finality bottlenecks Ethereum's scalability and efficiency, while also not providing reorg resilience. The road to a single slot finality protocol compatible with Ethereum and its desired traits is fraught with technical and security challenges, making a mainnet implementation years away. This work offers a comparative analysis of leading and innovating consensus mechanisms based on criteria such as time to finality, decentralization, asynchrony resistance, and security, aiming to identify possible replacements for all or part of Gasper. It delves into the fundamental techniques and considerations for achieving single slot finality. Furthermore, the thesis introduces novel consensus designs offering different trade-offs, thereby expanding the research landscape and paving the way for future investigations.