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arXiv · 2405.00549

A Fast Confirmation Rule for the Ethereum Consensus Protocol

Roberto Saltini·Mikhail Kalinin·Luca Zanolini·Francesco D'Amato·Aditya Asgaonkar·Chenyi Zhang
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Abstract

A Confirmation Rule is an algorithm run by network nodes to determine whether a block will remain permanently in the canonical chain. The only Confirmation Rule currently available in Ethereum's consensus protocol, Gasper, is FFG finalization. While it tolerates asynchronous network conditions, it is slow: in the best case, a transaction takes 13 to 19 minutes to confirm, depending on when it is submitted. We devise a Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) for Gasper that, under synchrony and the assumptions stated in this paper, achieves a best-case confirmation time of 12 seconds, a single slot, providing an order-of-magnitude improvement over FFG finalization. The rule is complementary to finalization: users who trust synchrony obtain fast confirmations, while finalization remains available as a fallback that tolerates asynchrony. Gasper is an ebb-and-flow protocol: it combines LMD-GHOST, a fork-choice rule providing fast progress under synchrony, with FFG-Casper, a finality gadget providing finality under partial synchrony. The main technical difficulty is to reason jointly about these two components, so that a block confirmed by LMD-GHOST cannot be filtered out by FFG-Casper's rules. We prove that the rule satisfies both safety, confirmed blocks remain canonical, and monotonicity, a confirmed block remains confirmed at all future times.

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Roberto Saltini, Mikhail Kalinin, Luca Zanolini, Francesco D'Amato, Aditya Asgaonkar, Chenyi Zhang. 2024-05-01. A Fast Confirmation Rule for the Ethereum Consensus Protocol. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00549

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