# EPF - Update 7

After vacation and wrapping up some personal commitments, I had a chance to talk with Franseco D'Amato who is a consensus researcher at EF. Discussing about protocol research with him was very insightful.

It took some time but I have finally narrowed down a project proposal which is to research a novel consensus mechanism to acheive single slot finality and dynamic availability.

A novel mechanism has the following benefits:
- LMD-GHOST like protocols would require committee based architectures that don't work well for dynamic availability
- there are other problems that arise in GHOST like designs that may not be present in a novel protocol
- prevents tunnel view designs and provides a broad set of protocols to evaluate from

As I gain a deeper understanding of the consensus landscape I also plan to contribute to spec writing and prototyping of existing porotcols.

SSF is gaining a lot more attention in the community which will only increase further as projects like peerDAS are wrapped up.

Project proposal: https://github.com/eth-protocol-fellows/cohort-five/projects/ssf-consensus-research.md