Vitalik Buterin unveils bold vision to Drastically Change Ethereum's proof-of-stake mechansim

The co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, has mentioned that there are a lot of things that need improvement in the area of proof-of-stake consensus mechanism of Ethereum despite its existing strengths in decentralisation and stability.

In a post on Oct 14, Buterin wrote in a blog post to talk about some potential upgrades that he might introduce in the future to enhance transaction speeds, boost security, and make staking ore accessible for solo participants.

The roadmap focuses both on technical improvements as well as economic improvements. The technical improvements would include factors like stability while the economic improvements will include details like centralisation.

Buffing up Ethereum performance

One of Buterin's mains goals is to reduce Ethereum's transaction times. Currently, transactions can take up to 15 minutes to finalize, which often leads to congestion and delays. In order to cut down the transaction time, Buterin suggested the introduction of "single-slot finality" method, which could help in lessening the block finalization time. This could allow reduced the time taken to finalize from 15 mins to just 12 seconds.

Buterin also proposed strategies to accelerate these improvements, including using ZK-SNARKs for better signature aggregation. This could allow Ethereum to process signatures from millions of validators in one slot.

Additionally, he introduced the idea of orbit committees, which involve the random selection of a medium-sized group responsible for finalizing blocks while maintaining security.

Lowering the barriers of staking

Staking accessibility is another key concern. Currently, users need at least 32 ETH (around $81,500) to participate in staking. This takes the restriction to the next level and the co-founder wants to reduce it to 1 ETH , which would massly improve the solo staking engagement.

By lowering the minimum, Buterin believes other concerns would take precedence in limiting solo staking, potentially opening the door for more users to contribute to the network.

Strengthening Ethereum's security

Buterin also emphasises the need for stronger Ethereum's security. One proposed solution is using "single secret leader election," a crypto graphic technique that would make it harder for attackers to disrupt the network.

Currently, validators proposing the next block are identified ahead of time, creating a security risk. Attackers could target specific validators with denial-of-service (DoS) attacks just as they are about to propose a block.

The single secret leader election would obfuscate the validator's identity using cryptographic methods, preventing attacks from knowing who will propose the next block until the last moment.

Other minor changes

Buterin suggested raising the quorum threshold from 67% to 80%, improving Ethereum's security. With this change, a quorum-blocking minority of solo stakers would only need 21%. This would strengthen the network's resistance to attacks, particularly in scenarios where a 51% attack or censorship might be attempted.

He also highlighted the need to prepare for quantum computing threats, which would challenge the network in the future, and the ability to recover from 52% of attacks.

Buterin has yet to reveal exactly when he will execute these plans, but the demand for improvement to maintain an overall balance is highly focused by the co-founder. According to him, a protocol should be suitably simple and comfortable to execute over the independent blockchain that runs over its own network.