# EPF - Final Dev Update The Ethereum Protocol Fellowship has been a really exciting experience for me. Through this fellowship I had a chance to dive deep into consensus research and understand the protocol better. I also had a chance to talk to and connect with amazing people working in this field. ### Proposal I initially proposed working on Single Slot Finality which is an ambitious project to reduce the time to finality on Ethereum and also eliminate the problem of reorgs. I started research on the protocol and studied upon existing work but over the course of the fellowship, I narrowed my scope to dynamically available protocols. During this time, I got conencted to Francesco (Ethereum Researcher) and Lincoln (EPF Alum, current Coinbase) and spoke to them about my proposals. In particular, I was insterested in exploring the relationship between the properties of dyamically available protocols. ### Work I read up on fundamental topics in distributed systems and blockchain consesnus like Nakamoto consensus, BFT protocols, sleepy model of consensus, Ebb n Flow protocols and of course the Gasper protocol used by Ethereum 2.0 Then my work started by researching how some new proposed dynamically available protocols could work. These protocols were worked upon as part of SSF research to mitigate teh fundamental issue of LMD-GHOST with reorgs. This included learnig about view-merge techniques, vote expiry, GoldFish, asynchrony resiliiance and RLMD GHOST. While understaning these topics, a pattern is observed. In order to achieve re-org ressiliance, some property of the protocol must be sacrified. Goldfish is a dynamically available protocol which is not asynchrony ressiliant while RLMD GHOST balances between dynamic availablity and asynchrony ressiliance but does not allow subsampling. Their seems to be a an impossibility between reorg ressiliance, asynchrony ressiliance and sub committees. An interesting result would be to formally prove this result. I made a rough attempt at logically thinking of a proof but it is far from being formal. Read more: https://hackmd.io/Suklfd0RT4umHRdCLLfpTA Another interesting thing to research is trying to figure a way to combine these protocols to achieve all these properties simaltaneosly. Read more: https://hackmd.io/@0xpanicError/rkWGZHKg1e ### Future Work A lot of work needs to still get done in this field. For starters I wish to formalise the impossibility result if possible. Having a formal proof of a property is extremely helpful in developing robust protocols. More interestingly, I would like to further refine the "Combining Asynchrony Resilliance with Sub-Committees" idea and post it on eth reserach forum to get community review and understand more about how the researchers think about the protocol. Simaltanoeusly, I've started work on a paper that cumalates the reserach I've done during the fellowship and explains the current state of dynamically available protocols. It would be really helpful to onboard new researchers into the field by giving them an overview of the literature. Finally, with all the work I've done in the fellowship, I've grown incredibly fond of consensus research and have a good understanding of this space. I'm impressed by the recent Beam Chain proposal by Justin Drake and would love to contribute to that as well. I would like to thank Mario and Josh for giving me a chance to work on this project and Francesco for mentoring me through the felloship.