Founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin Aims to Overhaul Proof-of-Stake Mechanism to Alleviate Ethereum Overload
Ethereum's co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed three solutions to address current shortcomings in the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism used by Ethereum.
Vitalik Buterin Aims to Overhaul Proof-of-Stake Mechanism to Alleviate Ethereum Overload
In a forum post among Ethereum developers, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of ETH, proposed ways for the world's largest smart contract blockchain to address current issues with the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism.
Buterin wrote:
"A streamlined PoS proposal: design an architecture that only requires 8192 signatures per slot, simplifying the consensus process and reducing data overhead."
A PoS simplification proposal: make a design that only requires 8192 signatures per slot (even with SSF), making the consensus implementation considerably simpler and lighter.https://t.co/Z8mK7vZx7g
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 27, 2023
The issue highlighted by Ethereum's co-founder revolves around the requirement for validators participating in the Proof-of-Stake network to perform multiple transaction attestations. As the network attracts more validators, the number of signatures required scales multiplicatively, burdening the system with handling large amounts of data.
Therefore, Vitalik Buterin has outlined three approaches for Ethereum to mitigate this issue by reducing the number of signatures required per transaction slot (block).
The first proposed solution involves promoting the development of decentralized staking pools, raising the ETH threshold required for staking to become a validator from 32 ETH to 4,096 ETH, encouraging network participants to collaborate as validators.
The second approach divides staking validators into two groups with differing workloads. The first group requires a minimum staking of 4,096 ETH and participates in transaction validation, while the second group has no minimum staking requirement and focuses on enhancing network security.
The third approach involves rotating validators, randomly selecting a group of validators to process transactions for each slot.
Vitalik Buterin noted that each approach comes with its trade-offs, sacrificing Ethereum's decentralization to ensure the network's long-term sustainability.
In recent times, Ethereum's co-founder has also expressed personal views on emerging issues within ETH, including the categorization of zkEVM, the rise of layer-2 solutions, decentralized protocol issues of liquid staking, and SocialFi networks.
