Consensus Contract

A consensus contract (CC) is an onchain AVS. Note that a CC can be an AVS, but an AVS does not have to be a CC.

Advantages

The advantages of an consensus contract is multi-fold. Read more about e.g. slash immunity.

The development of consensus contract AVSs are also considerably easier, we believe, as everything is executed as read-and-write with an EVM L2. There's no need for peer-to-peer infrastructure, and you can circumvent all the traditional potential attack vectors on a distributed network/blockchain such as double attestations or DDoS attacks.

Limitations

By processing consensus onchain, the consensus will then effectively be limited by the blockchain that it's doing the computation on. For example, finality for a consensus contract cannot exceed the finality of the underlying blockchain that it's being run on. Gossiping would also be limited in that regard, where one would have to wait a sufficient amount of time for transactions to be sequenced/included in a block (hence, capped by the TPS of the underlying blockchain).