2026-07-21T20:03:34Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:22543 2025-10-02T11:05:41Z ddc:004 open_access

Incentive Compatibility of Ethereum’s PoS Consensus Protocol Pavloff, Ulysse Amoussou-Guenou, Yackolley Tucci-Piergiovanni, Sara Ethereum PoS Game Theory Block Reward This paper investigates whether following the fork-choice rule in the Ethereum PoS consensus protocol constitutes a Nash equilibrium - i.e., whether the protocol that maintains the canonical chain in Ethereum is incentive-compatible. Specifically, we explore whether selfish participants may attempt to manipulate the fork-choice rule by forking out previous blocks and capturing the rewards associated with those blocks. Our analysis considers two strategies for participants: the obedient strategy, which adheres to the prescribed protocol, and the cunning strategy, which attempts to manipulate the fork-choice rule to gain more rewards. We evaluate the conditions under which selfish participants might deviate from the obedient strategy. We found that, in a synchronous system, following the prescribed fork-choice rule is incentive-compatible. However, in an eventually synchronous system, the protocol is eventually incentive-compatible - that is, only a limited number of proposers will find it profitable to fork the chain during the synchronous period. After this sequence of cunning proposers, subsequent proposers will find it more profitable to follow the protocol. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Ulysse Pavloff and Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni 2025 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 324, 28th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2024) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.7 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-225431 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.7 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode