How can Ethereum PoS be improved?

Ethereum has successfully operated the PoS system for nearly two years, demonstrating excellent stability, performance, and decentralization. However, PoS still has some important areas that need improvement, mainly including technical feature enhancements and economic changes to address centralization risks. This article focuses on potential improvement directions in the technical design of PoS.

Single-slot finality and staking democratization

Currently, Ethereum takes 15 minutes to complete a block, with a minimum staking threshold of 32 ETH. The ideal situation is:

• Complete block final confirmation within a time slot of 12 seconds or shorter (
• Allow 1 ETH to stake ) from 32 ETH to 1 ETH (

These two goals conflict with the objective of reducing node operating costs. Currently, there are several main solutions:

1. Brute force attack: Develop better signature aggregation protocols, possibly using ZK-SNARKs.

2. Orbit Committee: A medium-sized committee selected randomly is responsible for final confirmation.

3. Two-tier staking: Stakers are divided into high and low levels, only high-level participants directly engage in economic finality.

4. Maintain the status quo

Each plan has its pros and cons, which need to be weighed. Possible combination schemes include:

• Add Orbit but do not execute single-slot finality
• Use brute force techniques to reduce the minimum deposit size but do not execute single-slot finality.
• Execute Orbit SSF with conservative parameters and supplement with brute force techniques.
• Add rainbow staking but do not execute single-slot finality

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Single Secret Leader Election

The purpose is to hide the proposer information of the next block to prevent targeted DoS attacks.

The main method is to create a "blind" validator ID for each validator, and then randomly select a blind ID as the proposer. Only the owner of that blind ID can generate a valid block proposal proof.

The main challenge is to find a sufficiently simple protocol implementation that avoids excessively increasing the complexity of Ethereum. It may be necessary to wait until Ethereum introduces zero-knowledge proof mechanisms for other reasons before considering it.

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Faster Transaction Confirmation

The goal is to reduce the confirmation time from about 12 seconds to around 4 seconds. There are mainly two technical routes:

1. Reduce the time slot to 8 seconds or 4 seconds.
2. Allow proposers to publish pre-confirmations during the time slot process.

Reducing the time slot may introduce centralization risks. The pre-confirmation method can improve the average case, but it cannot improve the worst case.

The key issue is how to incentivize pre-confirmation. If attempts are not made to shorten the confirmation time, the ecosystem may become more reliant on the pre-confirmation mechanisms of L2.

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Other Research Directions

• 51% Attack Recovery: Attempt to reduce reliance on the social layer, partially automating the recovery process.

• Increase the quorum threshold: raise from 67% to 80%, enhancing security.

• Quantum Resistance: Develop quantum-resistant alternatives to prepare for the future

Overall, Ethereum PoS still has multiple aspects that can be further optimized and improved, and it needs to find a balance between security, decentralization, and performance.

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