How upcoming EIPs affect preconfirmations

By Aikaterini-Panagiota Stouka and Conor McMenamin, all Nethermind. This article was completed thanks to funding from the PBS Foundation. Thanks to Lin Oshitani, also Nethermind, for the thorough review and many comments. Thanks to Davide from PBS Foundation for reviewing.

Introduction

Preconfirmations are a specific type of commitment from block proposers and builders that give users assurances about their transaction inclusion/execution before the proposer or builder publishes a completed block for finalization. However, most preconfirmation protocols have been designed and analysed with the Ethereum’s current design in mind. Thanks to Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs*), Ethereum is always changing and upgrading. Some of these EIPs directly affect the compatibility of preconfirmation protocols, either by design or as a side-effect.

This article looks at some of the most impactful EIPs from preconfirmations’ perspective, and examines how these EIPs will affect preconfirmations, and what amendments, if any, can be adopted by preconfirmation protocols to stay compatible if/when these EIPs get included on Ethereum. These EIPs seek to modify how L1 block proposers are selected, hide the proposer lookahead, distribute block proposal responsibilities across multiple entities, or introduce new entities who contribute to block content and censorship resistance. This report analyzes how these EIPs are likely to affect preconfirmations, based on the most plausible EIP designs at the time of writing.

Summary of Analysis

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Outline of the Article

In the Preliminaries section, we present;

  1. The types of preconfirmations, categorised based on:
    1. Which layer the transactions correspond to (L1 or L2)
    2. The nature of the guarantees that the preconfirmations provide (inclusion or execution)
  2. Key preconfirmation protocol features in the current designs:
    1. Punishments when the preconfer deviates.
    2. Rewards/Tips that compensate the preconfer.

In the Framework for Analysing Each EIP section, we introduce the framework used to assess whether and how existing preconfirmation designs are affected by the proposals and EIPs.

Subsequently, each of the following sections examines a specific EIP. The EIPs we analyse are:

  1. Inclusion lists. Specifically:
    1. Fork-Choice enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL)
    2. An Auction-Based Inclusion List Design for Enhanced Censorship Resistance on Ethereum (AUCIL)
  2. Multiple Concurrent Proposers (MCP)
  3. Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE),
  4. Attester Proposer Separation (APS)