Ethereum developers draft EIP-7917 proposal to solve the uncertainty of the existing proposer election

On March 27th, Ethereum developers @linoscope and @JustinDrake jointly drafted the EIP-7917 proposal (Deterministic proposer lookahead), aiming to completely solve the uncertainty issue in the current proposer election process. In the current Ethereum consensus, the system selects a proposer for a slot from the entire active validator set using a random sampling algorithm based on a random number (such as RANDAO) and Effective Balance weighting, although the RANDAO seed can be obtained in advance, fluctuations in validator Effective Balance within an epoch make it difficult to fully predict the proposers for the next epoch, posing risks to on-chain applications based on the pre-commitment protocol.

EIP-7917 addresses the uncertainty issue in the existing design caused by dynamic changes in validator Effective Balance by precomputing and storing a deterministic list of proposers at the beginning of each epoch. This not only enhances the security of the system, preventing validator manipulation, but also simplifies the implementation of on-chain protocols while maintaining backward compatibility and scalability.