The leading smart contract platform by volume is seeing a rise in price after its co-founder shared a proposal to simplify its proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism.
In a new thread, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin releases his proposal on how to improve the top altcoin’s blockchain, saying that it would make the proof-of-stake system “considerably simpler and lighter.”
[adinserter block="1"]In the proposal, Buterin says that the upgrade would boost decentralization and allow regular individuals to partake in staking. However, he notes that the proposal comes at a high cost.
“This approach requires the Ethereum chain to process a huge number of signatures (~28,000 today; 1,790,000 post-SSF [single slot finality]) per slot, which is a very high load. Supporting this load entails a lot of technical sacrifices.”
According to Buterin, Ethereum’s centralization works against it because if it were to suffer an attack, it would cost the network about 9 million tokens, or $20 billion.
“If a 51% attack takes place [on Ethereum], a large fraction of the entire attacking validator set has their deposits slashed. The cost of an attack is at present around 9 million ETH (~$20 billion), and that assumes network synchrony breaks in a way that maximally favors the attacker. I argue that this is a high cost, but it is too high a cost, and we can afford to make some sacrifices in the matter…
This is why I advocate a moderate solution: one that makes some sacrifices on validator accountability, but still keeps the amount of total slashable ETH quite high, but in exchange gets us most of the benefits of a smaller validator set.”
Buterin concludes that the optimal number of signatures to process per slot for ETH is 8192 as it would make it “much easier for anyone to run a consensus client, and users, staking enthusiasts and others would be able to immediately work off of that assumption.”
After the announcement, the price of Ethereum jumped to $2,442. However, it has since stabilized and is trading for $2,370 at time of writing, a fractional increase during the last 24 hours.
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