Ethereum developers draft EIP-7917 proposal to address the uncertainty surrounding the election of existing proponents
On March 27th, Ethereum developer @linoscope and @JustinDrake jointly drafted the EIP-7917 proposal (Deterministic Proposer Preview | Deterministic Proposer lookahead), which aims to completely solve the uncertainty problem of the election of existing proponents. In the current Ethereum consensus, the system selects a validator from the entire set of active validators through a random sampling algorithm weighted by random numbers (such as RANDAO) and effective balance (Effective Balance) as the block proponent of the slot. Although RANDAO seeds are available in advance, the validator's effective balance may fluctuate within the epoch, making it difficult for the proponent of the next epoch to fully predict, which brings hidden dangers to on-chain applications based on pre-confirmation protocols.
EIP-7917 solves the problem of proponent arrangement uncertainty in existing designs due to dynamic changes in validator effective balances by pre-computing and storing a deterministic proponent list at the beginning of each epoch. This not only improves the security of the system and prevents validator manipulation, but also simplifies the implementation of on-chain protocols while maintaining backward compatibility and scalability.