Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently shared his insight into the protocol’s “the Merge” mechanism. His insight clarifies how the blockchain plans to achieve better functionalities moving forward
Vitalik Buterin’s proposition aims to improve Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake system despite its stability over the past two years. It will also enhance the chain’s overall performance.
Improving Staking and Achieving Single-Slot Finality
According to Buterin, the primary focus includes achieving “economic finality” (or single-slot finality) and democratizing the staking process.
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The Ethereum co-founder noted that the current confirmation is not as seamless as he envisioned. However, democratizing the process must be balanced not to compromise security.
Buterin proposes to achieve single-slot finality, that is, finalize a block in one slot, by reducing the duration it takes. At the moment, this lasts for approximately 15 minutes. However, Buterin believes in optimizing it to last just a few seconds. The goal is to make transactions faster and more energy efficient.
In his democratization of staking proposition, Buterin hopes to lower the barrier to acting as a validator. The existing arrangement requires 32 ETH to run a node. This huge staking fee limits access to the number of validators. To achieve more participation, Buterin hopes to see this scaled down to 1 ETH.
If achieved, this will guarantee that more users participate in securing the network and enhance decentralization.
Vitalik Buterin Proposes Solutions to Challenges
It is worth noting that while these goals are laudable, they come with certain challenges. Many validators might increase the time required to process their signatures and validate transactions.
Additionally, the existing 32 ETH fee serves as a safeguard against attacks. The attacker would lose large amounts of Ethereum to carry out a successful attack. With a lower fee of 1 ETH, an attacker could exploit the chain repeatedly and not lose much.
Buterin proposed three solutions to solve these challenges and meet the envisioned goals. They include implementing brute force, introducing an Orbit committee, and a two-tiered staking mechanism.
Implementing brute force involves improving the signature aggregation protocols. To actualize this, Buterin believes the ZK-SNARKs might allow the processing of signatures from millions of validators. He hopes this will happen without leading to extremely high node-operator overhead.
According to Buterin, the Orbit committee will comprise medium-sized members responsible for finalizing the chain and preserving cost-of-attack properties.
The two-tiered staking mechanism will comprise two classes of stakers with higher and lower deposit requirements. The higher deposit tier will be directly linked to providing economic finality, while the lower deposit tier has the right to delegate stake to a higher-tier staker.
Ethereum’s Future Prospect
Vitalik Buterin’s overall goal is to ensure that Ethereum performs optimally, is secured, and has faster transactions.
The Ethereum co-founder recently expressed his thoughts on enhancing the chain’s functionalities. He hopes to promote a unified ecosystem rather than developers, researchers, and Layer-2 teams building individually.
Ethereum continues to seek ways to boost performance, such as with the Dencun upgrade, which reduced transaction fees and improved network scalability. Since the upgrade, the network’s ability to handle high-volume transactions has increased.
Overall, the updates and plans for ecosystem enhancement have helped buoy the price of Ethereum. At the time of writing, ETH’s price changed hands for $2,623.24, up by 7.23% in the past 2 hours.
