How long non-finality could kill Ethereum
Duration: 00:16:01
Speaker: Dapplion
Type: Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Nov 2024
After the merge, Ethereum has a finality gadget to provide an economic assurance that transactions will never be reverted. When 2/3 of the validator set are online and agree, we finalize. Otherwise, we enter a period of non-finality which can be very long, up to a few weeks. Long non-finality has never happened in Ethereum's history and could trigger a cascade of failures that will kill liveness. How can we harden the network against this? How high are the stakes?