The SSV Network is about to undergo its first major upgrade since its inception, with the mainnet of the Alan Fork. In addition to meeting the ecosystem’s increasing demands, this scalability update paves the way for further improvements. The SSV Network’s goal of developing decentralized staking is reflected in the fork, which carries Alan Turing’s name.
Why the Alan Fork Matters
The SSV Network has grown greatly since launching its mainnet in December 2023 and is now a major participant in the Ethereum staking ecosystem. With over 1.4 million ETH secured by 43,000 validators and over 1,000 internationally dispersed node operators, the protocol grew to rank among the top five staking providers on Rated in a matter of months.
In order to address the scalability requirements, the Alan Fork lowers the networking and processing overhead necessary for consensus. The Committee-Based Consensus and optimization of subnet allocations also reduce the volume of communications sent and received over the network.
Increasing the Effectiveness of Networks
Alan Fork’s main goal is to improve scalability by lowering the demands on node operators’ resources. Two advances are used to accomplish this. The network aggregates the responsibilities of validators under the same committee rather than conducting separate consensus procedures for each validator’s task.
Alan fork initial results (first @ssv_network fork)
– CPU reduced by ~70%
– Networking reduced by ~90%
That means @ssv_network runs better, faster and with less resources
(Larger operators will see bigger gains) pic.twitter.com/dFNcsfvw2J
— alonm.eth (@AmMuroch) November 25, 2024
Committees now exchange messages instead of individual validators. This method reduces the number of subnets that operators must keep an eye on and decreases message duplication.
Gains in Performance
The Alan Fork’s preliminary testing has shown remarkable resource savings:
After the fork, internal DevNet testing showed a 70% decrease in CPU utilization. CPU profiling, which examined the amount of time spent on different processes within the SSV node, was used to measure this. Prior to the fork, 3.3 hours of CPU time were required; with the update, this time dropped to 37.5 minutes.
As fewer communications are sent across the network, bandwidth use has dropped by 90%. The exchange rate decreased from 1,800 messages per second to about 300.
These results were further supported by telemetry data gathered from staging environments. Nodes running the modified software maintained constant validator performance across the same periods, although they used a lot less resources.
Committee-Based Consensus in Details
The success of the Alan Fork is largely due to the implementation of Committee-Based Consensus. This mechanism reorganizes how consensus is executed by focusing on committees instead of individual validators.
A committee overseeing 500 validators, for instance, could have to complete multiple attestation tasks at the same time window. This would typically entail conducting separate consensus procedures for every duty. However, a single consensus process may be sufficient because different responsibilities frequently call for agreement on the same data (such as the status of the blockchain at the moment). The computational overhead greatly decreases by this consolidation.
Previously, each validator’s interaction was sent and received across a subnet that was determined by the validator’s public key. As a result of validators sharing responsibilities, redundant messages were sent across subnets. In order to ensure that only relevant messages are sent, the Alan Fork modifies this strategy by allocating subnets according to committee identification.
Due to this simplicity, an operator only has to participate in three subnets instead of the usual 81.
The SSV Labs team is actively investigating more optimizations, even if the Alan Fork already offers major advantages. Performance improvements and network topology are two interesting areas the company is working on right now.
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