How Proof of Stake Ethereum Works
A series of articles to help explain the proof of stake protocol for researchers, developers, and users interested in the tech
Ethereum has reached one of its long awaited milestones — The Merge!
It was truly momentous. After 7 long long years, the Ethereum community managed to replace proof of work with a proof of stake consensus protocol. The immediate impact is reducing the network’s energy consumption by a whopping 99.95% and 0.02% of global electricity usage.
Hooray!
There are also many other technical benefits to celebrate the upgrade, but the benefits are lost to most of the community. It is time — especially now that proof of stake is protecting hundreds of billions of dollars — to write more accessible material on how it works, why it is important, and what exciting features await us.
To support this effort, we have put together an extensive series of articles to explain the proof of stake protocol. It is geared towards researchers, developers, and ultimately users who interested in the tech.
Over the course of two weeks, we will publish the following articles and update the respective links.
Alongside some additional topics:
Sway attacks (future edition)
Sync Committees (future edition)
We hope this helps you grasp how the proof of stake protocol works and it serves as a helpful pre-requisite before diving into a consensus client code or as part of your development process.
gl frens 🫡
Acknowledgements. I’d like to thank the Teku team, especially Ben Edington and Mikhail Kalinin for very very patiently answering my questions.
p.s., All articles will silently updated over time — perhaps to better explain a concept or if an inaccuracy is found by a reader :)
Cool!
Can’t wait!