Fully Decentralized Collection of Attestations for Single-Slot Finality in Ethereum

Abstract

After successfully transitioning from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, the Ethereum blockchain’s developer community has set an ambitious goal of achieving rapid block finalization, ideally completing it before the next block proposal, a concept known as single slot finality. Currently, block finalization on the ETH beacon chain takes ∼ 15 minutes to collect the attestation from the majority of the validators. The current protocol has several drawbacks, including slow finalization, high bandwidth usage and a rigid aggregation structure that is prone to failures. The challenge is collecting cryptographic signatures from close to a million validators distributed worldwide, connected to the network in 12 seconds without requiring high bandwidth internet connections from the peers in the network. This study presents an alternative scheme that has the potential to realize single-slot finality. Ours is a fully decentralized approach in which no node has a specific role, rendering it more robust than the current one. We simulate our heuristics on the Ethereum network topology and demonstrate that it can efficiently collect a million attestations from almost ten thousand physical nodes.