Ethereum
Ethereum Core developer offers execution-layer cross-validation
The solution for Ethereum validators to reduce penalties could lie in cross-validation, according to a proposal from lead developer Péter Szilágyi.
Péter Szilágyi shared a proposal to resolve heavy validator penalties for lack of consensus.
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Published June 26, 2024 at 5:21 am EST.
Ethereum’s Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus provides economic incentives to participants who stake their ether and mine validators, with the reduction mechanism playing an important role in controlling validators.
Validators who engage in dishonest behavior are penalized by being “kicked” from the network and the proportion of their staked ETH will be destroyed by the network. However, the majority of acts of aggression that take place are often unintentional.
“Client diversity in Ethereum is extremely important due to aggressive sanctions: in the event of a consensus error, the more validators are wrong, the harsher the sanctions.” wrote Péter Szilágyi, lead developer of Ethereum, on GitHub, in a proposal for cross-validation on the execution layer.
An Ethereum client is an implementation of Ethereum that verifies data against the protocol’s rules and maintains network security, with nodes running consensus clients and an execution client.
Among the five Ethereum execution clients, Geth controls 47.6% and Nethermind 34.5% according to data from Ethernet nodes. This means that in a situation where the majority of validators on Geth are wrong, those validators and the entire networks are in a less than ideal risk bracket, according to Szilágyi.
While developers often emphasized the need to run multiple clients side-by-side and a greater diversity of clients, Szilágyi acknowledged that this was not always realistic given different resource requirements and hidden incompatibilities.
He proposes adding an additional cross-validation step, in which the user’s client creates a witness for the block that executes it and sends the witness to various other clients. Then the aggregate results of these clients could be sent to the consensus client.
“Instead of asking people to manage a minority client (which can be inconvenient), or asking them to manage multiple clients (which can be expensive), we can let them use the client of their choice, and instead only ask them to cross-validate with other clients, without state,” Szilágyi said.