# Incentives in Ethereum's Hybrid Casper Protocol

## TL;DR

This paper presents an overview of Ethereum's hybrid Casper protocol, highlighting its incentive mechanisms, safety and liveness guarantees, and discussing implementation challenges and limitations.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of Casper FFG's design, incentives, and properties, including safety, liveness, and practical implementation considerations.

## Key findings

- Incentive mechanisms ensure protocol liveness.
- Safety guarantees improve over standard PoW.
- Implementation details reveal potential limitations.

## Abstract

We present an overview of hybrid Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG): a Proof-of-Stake checkpointing protocol overlaid onto Ethereum's Proof-of-Work blockchain. We describe its core functionalities and reward scheme, and explore its properties. Our findings indicate that Casper's implemented incentives mechanism ensures liveness, while providing safety guarantees that improve over standard Proof-of-Work protocols. Based on a minimal-impact implementation of the protocol as a smart contract on the blockchain, we discuss additional issues related to parametrisation, funding, throughput and network overhead and detect potential limitations.