Published on December 27, 2023 18:23 GMT+00:00edited on December 27, 2023 18:24 GMT+00:00

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed three ways for solving what he describes as a potential systemic complexity at the heart of Ethereum's proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.

"A PoS simplification proposal: make a design that only requires 8192 signatures per slot (even with SSF), making the consensus implementation considerably simpler and lighter," he posted on X.

The main issue is that validators who keep the network running have to make a lot of signatures — digital ones using cryptography — as part of the process to keep the network operating as it should. This is already quite significant work for the network to manage, but as more validators join the network, this will increase the number of signatures, putting further load on the system. Later upgrades are currently set …