Introduction

Ethereum is moving to a consensus mechanism called the ( PoS ) participation test from the test work ( PoW ). This has always been the plan, as it is a key part of the community's strategy to scale Ethereum through the updates. However, getting a correct PoS is a great technical challenge and it is not as simple as using PoW to reach consensus across the network. [1]

Decentralization isn’t a spectrum. It is one side of a sliding scale. And in crypto, finding an objective middle that distinguishes between centralized and decentralized projects is close to impossible. It is a subjective endeavor where projects can only measure their degree of decentralization or centralization in relation to each other. And because this measurement is essential to communicating how resistant a blockchain is against censorship and attacks, centralization accusations from competing projects are a common and persistent occurrence [2].

The Beacon Chain creates new blocks, verifies their validity, and rewards validators with ETH for keeping the network secure. The 2020 proof-of-stake blockchain was called Beacon Chain. Before enabling proof-of-stake on Ethereum Mainnet, it was constructed to test its logic. It ran alongside Ethereum's proof-of-work. Switching Ethereum from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake required telling the Beacon Chain to accept transactions from the original Ethereum chain, bundle them into blocks, and organise them using a proof-of-stake based consensus mechanism. The earliest Ethereum clients turned off mining, block propagation, and consensus logic at the same time. This was The Merge. After The Merge, there was one proof-of-stake Ethereum chain. Beacon Chain brought Ethereum proof-of-stake. The two chains united in September 2022. Beacon Chain presented Ethereum's consensus logic and gossip protocol.

A validator submits a proposed attestation to the network every epoch (about 6.4 minutes). This attestation pertains to a certain time period. Attestations support the validator's interpretation of the chain, specifically the most recently justified block and the initial block of the current epoch (known as source and target checkpoints). By combining this data for all participating validators, the network can agree on the blockchain's state.

The following items are included in the attestation:

aggregation bits is a bitlist of validators, where each place corresponds to an index of a validator on the committee; the value (0/1) denotes whether or not the validator signed the data (i.e. whether they are active and agree with the block proposer) data: signature Attestation Definition Information signatures from many validators combined into a single BLS signature To begin, an attesting validator must construct the data.

The following details can be found in the data:

index: The attestation's slot number

slot: The slot number to which the attestation pertains Validator Committee Number beacon block root: Validator's "root hash" of the block at the beginning of the chain (the result of applying the fork-choice algorithm) source: A portion of the finality vote that indicates the most recent block target that validators agree is justified: The first block of the current epoch, as determined by the validators, as a part of the finality vote. When the data has been assembled, the validator can verify their involvement by setting the bit in aggregation bits that corresponds to their own validator index from 0 to 1.

Attestations are then digitally signed by the validator and published to the network [3].

SLASHING

Slashing removes a validator from the network and steals their staked ether. Three techniques to cut a validator involve dishonest block proposals or attestation:

• By signing two blocks for the same slot
• By attributing a "surrounding" block (effectively changing history)
• By "doubling voting" for the same block

If these actions are detected, the validator is slashed. 1/32 of their staked ether (up to 1 ether) is burned, then a 36-day removal period begins. During this time, validators' stakes dwindle. At the midpoint (Day 18), an additional punishment scales with the total ether staked by sliced validators in the 36 days before the event. When more validators are sliced, the slash grows. Maximum slash is all slashed validators' effective balance (i.e. if there are lots of validators being slashed they could lose their entire stake). Single slashing events burn a little bit of the validator's stake. The correlation penalty scales with the number of sliced validators [4].

Method

In the current dashboard tried to trace the slashings of proposers and attesters since the Merge by use of Flipsidecrypto’s databace. ethereum.beacon_chain was the database used for this purpose.

Deposit_amount was counted and summed as the number & volume of depositing ETH to validators. attester_slashings & PROPOSER_SLASHINGS columns contained a json data so filtered that by following method:

when attester_slashings[0] is null then 'Without Slashing'
when attester_slashings[0] is not null then 'With Slashing'
when PROPOSER_SLASHINGS[0] is null  then 'Without Slashing'
else 'With Slashing' end as type,

To find slashings of proposers and attesters.

Analysis

:hourglass_flowing_sand: Overall View

✍🏻 Conclusion

As of Findings above:

It's safe to say that the debate over whether or not digital assets are truly decentralized will continue to be one of the most contentious in the cryptocurrency space. It can be anything from a discussion of the relative decentralization of proof-of-stake and proof-of-work protocols to a broader examination of the increasingly distributed nature of Ethereum. A definitive yes or no response is difficult to come by, but the growing number of validators, growth of deposited ETH amount, no slashing proposer and a little attester slashings and protocol improvements suggest a more decentralized network in the wake of the Merge.

About:

• Author: HaM☰d

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• Discord: 0xHaM☰d#8391

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• Twitter: @arjmandi_hamed

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• Email: h_arjmandi2012@yahoo.com

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Ethereum recently switched to using a Proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol. For more information on this switch, please see The Ethereum Organization.A new schema (`ethereum.beacon_chain`) was just released containing data around the Consensus Layer that can be used to analyze the Beacon Chain. Documentation for these tables can be found here.

Using the beacon_chain schema, analyze the decentralization of the PoS network, as well as slashings of proposers and attesters since the Merge.

Build a dashboard to summarize your findings / provide ongoing slashing monitoring.

Hey there 👋!

Firstly, I appreciate you sticking with it until the conclusion.

I'm Hamed, a civil engineering Ph.D.

student interested in data analysis.

I've made many similar dashboards and visualizations since I started at Flipside in January.

Please take a look at my various contact details and let me know what you think.

:telescope: Findings:

As of visuals above, since Sep 15th (The Merge Event Date) to date (Nov 9th), There are more than 62.4M deposited volume on the Beacon Chain by 2.1M times depositing.

In average 19.9 ETH has deposited to each validator by average 1117 times depositing.

In Sep 23th, the amount of deposit volume peaked at 55.6K to 1803 validators, then dropped to below 5K in Oct 9th and went up again to 50K in Oct 26th, although decreased again to date (Nov 9th)

We can see there is almost a constant number of produced blocks by validators per day over time.

:hourglass_flowing_sand: proposer_slashings and attester_slashings Over Time

In the charts below tried to present the block performance on beacon chain by use of ethereum.beacon_chain.fact_blocks table. the proposer_slashings and attester_slashings column shows the data for the blocks which had experienced slashing.

Bear in mind that on POW Ethereum, miners did not face the explicit punishment of slashing. Or, to put it another way, the only thing standing between miners and an attack on the network was the opportunity cost of doing so. The important thing to remember is that diversity on Ethereum after the Merge will be qualitatively different from what it was before the hard fork.

Since Ethereum's Merge event, the beacon chain has not had a slashing proposer. In contrast, only 14 epochs have had a slashing block, and only 23 blocks in Sep 15, 17, 21 & 23th, and October have had slashed Attesters. When compared to the other 393k blocks that have not been slashed, this is an extremely low number.

After the Merge event on the Beacon chain, we find that the lone slash reason is an Attestation rule violation.

:telescope: Findings:

Considering to the charts right, its observable that majority of validators (more than 32.5K of them) have deposited 32 ETH into the beacon chain. 2326 validators deposited 16 ETH.

40 validator has deposited with only 1 ETH.

Depositing of 2, 3 28 & 64 ETH to 1 validator, but not same.

2 & 37 validator deposited 4 & 31 ETH, respectively.

So, since the majority of validators have deposited 32 ETH into the beacon chain, we can say the network power is well distributed among these validators.

Distribution breakdown in terms of Epoch number are shown in the next chart.

As can be seen in 249 epoch deposited 32 ETH, 230 Epoch 16 ETH, 5 Epoch 5 ETH, 4 & 31 ETH on 2 Epoch and the rest only 1 ETH has deposited.