Today, Aztec Labs is thrilled to share the winning proposal from Aztec’s Sequencer Selection Request for Proposals (RFP) — “Fernet”.
At the heart of Fernet’s design is a fully permissionless, random leader election. This allows anyone to participate in building Aztec blocks and operating the network, cementing Aztec’s position as a decentralized Layer-2 zk-rollup.
📕 Read the 3-minute summary of Fernet’s decentralized sequencer selection protocol
The Aztec Labs team, with input from various industry leading experts, chose Fernet over the B52 protocol (and other designs submitted during the RFP process) due to its simplicity, safety, and ease of implementation.
📕 Read our previous announcement sharing B52 & Fernet as the two sequencer selection finalists
The random leader election in its design ensures that all participants have an equal opportunity to contribute. This not only fosters inclusivity and decentralization but also contributes nicely to the network’s censorship resistance properties, alongside features like forced transactions.
The Aztec Labs team could speak for hours on the tradeoffs and why this decision was made. We would love to engage in discussions, Twitter Spaces, or otherwise! Please reach out to our team for more information if you are curious and would like to discuss further.
To provide a comprehensive and independent perspective on our decision, we engaged BlockScience — a third-party firm specializing in complex systems engineering.
We’re excited to present BlockScience’s detailed report contrasting B52 and Fernet, shedding light on the broad set of considerations and trade-offs between random leader elections and enshrined MEV auctions.
This report — in addition to significant internal debate and research — culminated in our choice of Fernet.
We will be hosting a Twitter Spaces with BlockScience tomorrow, Tuesday September 19th, at 11am EST to answer questions from our community and discuss their report!
We are very appreciative of the numerous individuals that lent their expertise, feedback, and insights. Their collective input was pivotal in not only the decision but also refining Fernet’s final design, including but not limited to:
Santiago Palladino, Aztec Engineer, the primary author of the Fernet protocol
Yuki Yuminaga at Fenbushi Capital
Josh Bowen and the Astria team
Mike Neuder & George Kadianakis at the Ethereum Foundation
a16z research
We invite you to explore the latest draft of Fernet and share your feedback. There are some outstanding design decisions, such as whether to implement slashing 👀, that may be of interest.
We also encourage you to participate in our other RFPs, such as our upgrade mechanism design and our prover selection protocol (coming soon™).
📕 Read the 3-minute summary of Fernet’s decentralized sequencer selection protocol
BlockScience® is a complex systems engineering, R&D, and analytics firm. Our goal is to combine academic-grade research with advanced mathematical and computational engineering to design safe and resilient socio-technical systems. We provide engineering, design, and analytics services to a wide range of clients, including for-profit, non-profit, academic, and government organizations, and contribute to open-source research and software development.
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