Single slot finality

Status quo

• Slot

  • New block every new slot (12 seconds). Slots also contain attestations by a fixed-sized commitee.
  • Fork-choice rule: LMD Ghost takes these attestations as input and determines the head of the chain.

• Epoch

  • Every epoch (32 slots or 6.4 mins) all validators get a chance to attest once.
  • After 2 two epochs, an epoch and all the blocks of the epoch are finalized.
  • Reverting a finalized epoch requires atleast 1/3 validators to burn their deposit.

Benefits of Single slot finality

• UX
• MEV re-org resisteance: Makes it harder to re-org the chain for MEV extraction/maximisation.
• Protocol simplification:
  • Fork-choice rule is then only run in the special case of > 1/3 offline validators.