Vitalik Buterin proposes three ways to make Ethereum’s proof-of-stake design simpler.

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Co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed three ways to address the potential systemic complexities at the heart of Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.

“Proposal to simplify PoS: create a design that requires only 8192 signatures per slot (even for SSF), making consensus implementation much simpler and lighter.” Posted in.

The biggest problem is that the verifiers that keep the network running need to create many signatures, such as digital signatures using cryptography, as part of the process to keep the network running normally. This is already a fairly significant task for the network to manage, but as more validators join the network, the number of signatures increases, putting more load on the system. The latest upgrade is set to increase current signature requirements even more significantly.

Buterin outlined three ways to prevent this in a post on the Ethereum Research Forum on December 27: The common thread is finding a way to require only 8,192 signatures per slot on the Ethereum blockchain.

Three ways to solve the problem

The first solution focuses on decentralized staking pools. This includes making the minimum amount of Ethereum required to run a validator much higher, forcing those running validators to team up and combine resources.

The second approach is to have two tiers of stakers. One has heavier requirements and the other has lighter requirements. The two layers are treated differently in the way they are used in the block finishing process.

A third way is to keep the sets of participants alternating. That is, a random set of validators is selected for each slot. This distributes the workload and reduces the total number of signatures, but as Buterin points out, it adds complexity.

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