SoK: Speedy Secure Finality
Yash Saraswat, Abhimanyu Nag

TL;DR
This paper surveys the development of Speedy Secure Finality protocols in blockchain, focusing on reducing confirmation latency in Ethereum while maintaining security, and analyzes the theoretical primitives and practical protocols involved.
Contribution
It introduces core primitives like reorganization resilience and the sleepy model, and analyzes the 3-slot finality protocol as a practical solution.
Findings
Analysis of communication bottlenecks in large validator networks
Development of the generalized sleepy model
Evaluation of 3-slot finality protocol's balance of speed and security
Abstract
While Ethereum has successfully achieved dynamic availability together with safety, a fundamental delay remains between transaction execution and immutable finality. In Ethereum's current Gasper protocol, this latency is on the order of 15 minutes, exposing the network to ex ante reorganization attacks, enabling MEV extraction, and limiting the efficiency of economic settlement. These limitations have motivated a growing body of work on Speedy Secure Finality (SSF), which aims to minimize confirmation latency without weakening formal security guarantees. This paper surveys the state of the art in fast finality protocol design. We introduce the core theoretical primitives underlying this space, including reorganization resilience and the generalized sleepy model, and trace their development from Goldfish to RLMD-GHOST. We then analyze the communication and aggregation bottlenecks faced…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed systems and fault tolerance · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Software System Performance and Reliability
