Future Development Direction of Ethereum Attestation System

Since the merge upgrade in 2022, Ethereum has successfully operated its attestation consensus mechanism for nearly two years. Despite demonstrating excellent performance in stability, efficiency, and decentralization, there are still some key areas that require further improvement. The Ethereum development team is actively exploring multiple technical solutions to drive the continuous evolution of the protocol.

Main Improvement Goals

1. Achieve Single Slot Determinism (SSF)
2. Accelerate the speed of transaction confirmation and completion
3. Lower the threshold for independent staking
4. Enhance system robustness
5. Enhance resistance to 51% attacks

Single Slot Determinism and Staking Democratization

Currently, the finalization of Ethereum blocks takes about 15 minutes, with a minimum staking requirement of 32 ETH. Ideally, Ethereum aims to complete block finalization within a time slot (12 seconds or shorter) and reduce the staking threshold to 1 ETH. This will significantly enhance user experience and system security while allowing more small holders to participate in staking.

However, achieving these goals faces technical challenges, primarily how to maintain high efficiency and low overhead with a large number of validators participating. Currently, there are several potential solutions:

1. Improve the signature aggregation protocol, such as using ZK-SNARKs technology.
2. Adopt the Orbit committee mechanism to reduce node burden while maintaining high security.
3. Implement a dual-layer staking mechanism with different deposit requirements for each staking tier.

Each solution has its pros and cons, which need to be weighed between security, decentralization, and technical feasibility.

Single Secret Leader Election

The current election mechanism for Ethereum validators has security vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to know in advance who the proposer of the next block will be. To address this issue, the development team is researching the Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE) protocol. This protocol creates "blind" IDs for validators through encryption technology and repeatedly reshuffles and re-blinds them to conceal the identity of the block proposer.

However, implementing a simple and effective SSLE protocol is not an easy task. Currently, a simplified version of SSLE using ring signatures is being explored, but the issue of how to achieve resistance against quantum computing attacks still needs to be addressed.

Speeding up transaction confirmation

Shortening the transaction confirmation time from 12 seconds to 4 seconds will significantly improve user experience and enhance the efficiency of DeFi protocols. There are mainly two technical approaches:

1. Shorten the gap time to 8 seconds or 4 seconds
2. Allow proposers to publish pre-confirmations in a single time slot.

But both methods face challenges. Shortening the time slot may lead to centralization of validators, while the pre-confirmation method struggles to improve performance in the worst-case scenario.

Quantum Computing Threat Mitigation

In the face of potential quantum computing threats, Ethereum needs to develop alternatives based on hash or other quantum-resistant technologies for the current parts of the protocol that rely on elliptic curves. This is also one of the reasons why Ethereum maintains a conservative approach in its attestation design.

Conclusion

The technical evolution of the Ethereum attestation system is full of challenges. The development team is actively exploring multiple technical solutions to achieve higher levels of security, performance, and decentralization. In this process, it is necessary to weigh between different technical paths to find the most suitable solution for the long-term development of Ethereum. With the deepening of research and technological advancements, it is believed that Ethereum will continue to maintain its leading position in the blockchain field.