Vitalik Buterin proposes to make Ethereum PoS ‘easy and simple’

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a method to reduce the pressure on the Ethereum blockchain and make proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus “much easier and simpler.”

On December 28, Vitalik Buterin proposed a method to reduce the load and reduce the number of signatures required by validators to make the network work.

Ethereum currently supports around 895,000 verifiers to bring about decentralization and allow regular people to participate in staking.

However, supporting this many validators comes with major technical drawbacks as it requires the network to process a huge number of signatures, around 28,000 per token, “which is a very high load,” he said.

PoS Simplification Proposal: Create a design that only requires 8192 signatures per slot (even with SSF), making consensus implementation much simpler and simpler.https://t.co/Z8mK7vZx7g

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 27, 2023

Moreover, supporting this burden requires several sacrifices, such as quantum resistance, complex forking, and balancing signatures with zero-knowledge proofs (SNARKs).

The minimum of 32 ETH to be a validator is still too high for many, so it doesn't fully achieve its goal of enabling ordinary people to participate.

Instead of trying to get more and more signatures per lottery, Buterin advocated moving from the current 28,000 to 8,192 signatures per lottery as a modest solution.

This allows major technical simplification, makes the chain more quantum resistant, and still raises the total ETH to around 1-2 million ETH. Blocking is a technique used to enforce good authentication behavior.

Buterin suggested three possible approaches: reliance on fully decentralized staking pools, a two-tier system of “heavy” and “light” stadiums, and rotating participation with accountability committees.

The proposed solutions aim to reduce the burden of digital signatures to a manageable level.

Related: Vitalik Buterin Warns of Overloading Ethereum's Consensus Layer

The main benefit is to manage future signature payloads, making protocol and infrastructure deployments much easier.

“The future load of the Ethereum protocol will no longer be known,” he said, before concluding that “the future may be triggered by hard forks, but only when developers are confident that the technology has improved to be able to handle large volumes. The number of signatures-per-slot with the same level of convenience.”

In May, Vitalik Buterin warned of the dangers of “stretching” the Ethereum consensus' core functions of validating blocks and validating the network.

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