Explaining Ethereum's consensus mechanism after The Merge

Explaining Ethereum's consensus mechanism after The Merge

Welcome! In this article, we will dive deeper

Detailed Description of the Ethereum PoS Consensus Model

how Ethereum PoS can recover from malicious attacks

refute common anti-PoS talking points

discuss the practicalities of liquid staking or running your own node

The current state of the beacon chain. Produce blocks every 12 seconds within the time limit. View live data at https://beaconcha.in

Consensus mechanisms: PoS, PoW, PoA

A consensus mechanism defines how a distributed network of nodes decides the current state of the network, which blocks are in the chain, and in what order. Block production is a general term that describes who scans the mempool to retrieve pending transactions, orders them into blocks, and attaches the new block to the existing blockchain. Three common classes of consensus mechanisms are proof-of-stake, proof-of-work, and proof-of-authority.

PoW (Bitcoin) gives the power to produce blocks to whoever uses the most computing power. The protocol defines a computationally heavy one-way hash function such as SHA-256, then miners compete to find an input that hashes to an output with many leading zeros.

PoA (Binance Smart Chain) is a whitelist mechanism that gives block production power to a few whitelisted nodes. It's your typical authorized blockchain, nothing more.

PoS (Ethereum, soon™) gives blockmaking power to anyone who locks their native tokens, proportional to the number they have staked.

Ethereum Implementation

Ethereum's PoS implementation has been teased for a good half decade now, but with the tag...