Vitalik Buterin shares his vision for Proof of Stake upgrades

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shares his thoughts on the future of blockchain, announcing significant improvements aimed at making the network faster, more secure, and accessible to more users. I emphasized the point.

He said the transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) in 2022 was largely successful, but some areas of the network still need improvement.

Faster transactions and more access

He outlined several important developments in an October blog post, including block finality, staking accessibility, and network security.

Currently, transactions can take approximately 15 minutes to be confirmed, causing network congestion. To address this, Buterin suggested considering single-slot finality, which could potentially finalize a block in just 12 seconds.

The solution, which he first mentioned in July 2024, allows transactions to be completed almost instantly, dramatically improving user experience and network security.

The Ethereum co-founder also emphasized the need to make the staking process more accessible. Currently, users need to stake 32 ETH to participate as a validator. The cryptocurrency is currently trading at $2,600, which equates to an outlay of over $83,000. This relatively high cost is a barrier to entry for smaller players.

Buterin proposed lowering the minimum staking amount to 1 ETH, arguing that it would encourage more solo stakers to participate and prevent control from shifting to a few large organizations. To that end, he outlined some possible solutions. The brute force approach includes advanced cryptographic techniques such as zk-SNARK to efficiently aggregate signatures from millions of validators.

Another proposal is the introduction of an orbit committee that randomly selects a smaller group of validators to complete a transaction. This reduces the workload while maintaining economic finality.

Two-tier staking introduces two types of stakers. There are higher-tier stakers who directly influence finalization, and lower-tier stakers who delegate their staking or take a less active role.

Enhanced security

The Ethereum co-founder also emphasized the need for continuous security improvements. He recommended implementing a single secret leader selection method. This makes it more difficult for malicious attackers to target your network with denial of service (DoS) attacks.

In the current system, participants know who is responsible for proposing the next block, making it possible for malicious actors to target participants. Buterin's proposal counters this risk by keeping the identity of the block proposer secret until the block is generated.