Revolutionizing Ethereum and Polkadot: Efficient Verification of Casper FFG Consensus Proofs with SNARK-based Approach

The Ethereum (ETH) core developers have undertaken a lot of research to ensure safe scalability through zero-knowledge protocols. Moreover, zero-knowledge proofs can be used to generate cryptographic proofs that some computation has been performed outside of a blockchain in accordance with predefined rules. Nevertheless, countless protocols have come up with different technicalities for solving the zero-knowledge scaling solution

However, it is the Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (Casper FFG) that was jointly published by Ethereum core developer Vitalik Buterin and Virgil Griffith in 2017 that developer Seun Lanlege alias Web3 Philosopher on Twitter (@seunlanlege) presented research for a scaling protocol.

Closer Look at Casper FFG and Ethereum PoS

In the research article, the Polkadot and Ethereum developer presented a SNARK-based approach for verifying Ethereum’s Casper FFG consensus proofs. Notably, the SNARK-based scaling solution is famous among many layer two protocols since it uses a non-interactive smaller proof than the data it represents.

In this research article I present a SNARK based scheme for verifying the Ethereum's Casper FFG consensus proofs.

With this scheme on/offchain light clients can benefit from the crypto economic security provided by the ETH 17m ($34b) at stake.

— Web3 Philosopher (@seunlanlege) May 11, 2023

Although the Casper FFG uses a rather simple consensus mechanism, its proof of security has been described as rather difficult than normal. Moreover, Casper FFG is a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) inspired and improved consensus protocol. The Ethereum core developers argue in this direction since PBFT is characterized by a two-round voting mechanism that is permissionless, leader-based, and security-oriented.

According to Buterin, the key goal of Casper is to achieve economic finality.

“Economic finality is accomplished in Casper by requiring validators to submit deposits to participate, and taking away their deposits if the protocol determines that they acted in some way that violates some set of rules (“slashing conditions”),” Buterin noted in a Medium post.

Notably, the Ethereum beacon chain has significantly grown since the Merge event last year and currently has more than 18.3 million ether staked by more than 576k validators. With the SNARK-based scheme for verifying the Ethereum’s Casper FFG consensus proofs introduced by Seun Lanlege, both on and off-chain light clients can benefit from the crypto economic security provided by the ETH 17m ($34b) at stake.

“This protocol offers full node-level security that is orders of magnitude more secure than the sync committee, and is fully Byzantine fault-tolerant,” Lanlege noted.

Notably, Lanlege presented a detailed mathematical proof expression to show that the protocol is a more ambitious approach to directly verifying the Casper FFG consensus proofs.

Bigger Picture

The Ethereum network has one of the most comprehensive interdisciplinary professionals working together including economists, computer scientists, and philosophers among others. As a result, the Ethereum network has scaled to one of the leading smart contract ecos for building scalable, and secure decentralized applications

According to the latest crypto prices, the Ethereum (ETH) network has a total market capitalization of approximately $217.45 billion with a 24-hour traded volume of about $6.042 billion. Trading around $1,808 on Friday, Ethereum’s price was up approximately 50 percent YTD despite a 13 percent drop in the past month.