Block Builder Profitability | December 2023 - January 2024

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Block Builder Profitability | December 2023 - January 2024

This report offers insight into block-building profitability for December 2023 and January 2024.

TL;DR

  • We use previously introduced concept of adjusted profit to explain a builder’s on-chain net profit.
  • New adjustment, based on ultrasound adjusted bids (Fee payer address)
  • Total adjusted profit in the months of December and January is 4,113 ETH (811 ETH/month higher than November 2023
  • Four builders dominate the market (with 92% of total adjusted profit - Down from 5 in November 2023)
  • 15 builders each exceeded adjusted profit of 1 ETH per month (up from 14 builders in November)
  • There are a couple of new builders, subsidizing their blocks
  • Penguinbuild.org appears to be the first “new” builder that turned profitable after subsidizing their blocks for few months
  • You can now look at hourly updated data on builder profitability on Eden Data Dashboard
  • Impostor builders stopped spoofing Flashbots builder

Most Profitable Builders - Earned at least 1 ETH:

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Rank Builder Adj. Profit MEV-Boost Value Blocks Profitable Blocks Subsidy Blocks Zero Profit Blocks Total Subsidy
1. beaverbuild.org 2,560.687 15,703.780 128931 59906 51927 17098 -52.806
2. rsync-builder 542.435 13,128.628 101,436 35,532 15,315 50589 -43.320
3. Titan Builder 449.478 10,584.613 91,360 18,859 36,414 36087 -49.229
4. builder0x69 232.198 1,443.378 11,677 2,837 8,840 0 -3.785
5. Anon:0x83bee 215.224 832.745 551 551 0 0 0
6. BuildAI 75.121 301.278 1289 1,007 282 0 -0.236
7. Anon:0xb3a6d 70.486 225.473 324 324 0 0 0
8. Gambit Labs 18.335 706.940 7623 1037 6204 382 -16.890
9. lokibuilder.xyz 13.058 85.344 2258 583 1462 213 -3.950
10. from f1b 9.375 277.914 2809 728 2081 0 -2.886
11. @builder0x69 6.612 205.769 1697 367 1330 0 -0.623
12. f1b.io 5.701 223.462 2534 565 1969 0 -3.852
13. https://eth-builder.com 3.712 243.488 587 412 175 0 -0.223
14. bobTheBuilder 3.030 35.438 172 35 0 137 0
15. payload.de 2.504 11.629 108 84 24 0 -0.016
16. Other 5.809 11.629 22,184 934 43 21,207 -0.109

Notes:

  1. Official builder pubkeys were used when available (published on docs or websites of the builder), for other builders extra_data was used to identify the builder
  2. Two anonymous builders (tagged as Anon:0x...) were tagged as they were significantly profitable, compared to other builders that did not use any extra data
  3. The category ‘Other’ is grouped by all block builders that still made some profit or were balance neutral; all builders with negative profit were excluded
  4. Query for generating this results can be found here: BigQuery stored query

Most Profitable Blocks (Adjusted)

Builder Block Number Adj. Profit MEV-Boost Value Builder Received Profit Margin
beaverbuild.org 18926794 204.20716 39.43582 243.71915 83.79 %
builder0x69 18926740 130.5213 73.78782 204.31288 63.88 %
beaverbuild.org 18926741 106.93103 29.15827 136.09314 78.57 %
Anon:0x83bee 18805877 83.96484 141.83183 225.79751 37.19 %
beaverbuild.org 18734327 58.26454 25.48923 83.75448 69.57 %
beaverbuild.org 18926696 43.38697 15.22637 58.61446 74.02 %
beaverbuild.org 18778112 32.86571 39.54338 72.4102 45.39 %
beaverbuild.org 18926745 30.14074 13.92021 44.06492 68.40 %
beaverbuild.org 19114847 25.15461 3.50939 28.66437 87.76 %
beaverbuild.org 18926746 25.06144 17.82014 42.88593 58.44 %

Notes:

  1. Profit Margin is calculated with the following formula: 100 * (profit / (sent_to_builder + miner_rewards))
  2. Builders are identified where possible with pubkey tags and extra_data as a fallback
  3. Query for generating this results can be found here: BigQuery stored query

New adjustment

Ultrasound relay introduced adjusted bids (you can read more about them here), which introduce new concept in block building - Relay-controlled fee payer address.

This is an address, which is funded by builders (sometimes directly from builder coinbase, sometimes via CEX or external address) and is used by relay to create Mev-Boost payments, adjusted according to their new system (Second best bid + 1 wei)

This creates situations where builders accumulates value on their coinbase addresses, but Mev-Boost payments to validators are sent from a different address (the fee payer). Because of this, the previously introduced adjustments Account Linked to Builder Costs and Account Linked to Builder Profit are used together.

Simple explanation:

  1. Builder A accumulates block value on Address 0xBUILDER - 0,4 ETH
  2. Builder A sends their bid of 0,39 ETH to Ultrasound relay
  3. Ultrasound relay adjusts their bid to 0,35 ETH
  4. Mev-Boost transaction is sent from 0xFEE_PAYER

Without the adjustment we assume profit of 0,4 ETH, as the builder does not send anything to the validator. This actually accounts for significant differences between the adjusted and unadjusted builder profits (incorrectly reporting up to 7x higher profits in the past two months).

The list of fee payer addresses used in this adjustment was composed based on research and may be incomplete, as they are not publicly reported by builders or relays at this time.

Conclusions

  • Four builders continue to dominate the market
  • Total adjusted on-chain profit for builders grew by ~25% compared to November 2023
  • Second-price auction introduced by ultrasound relay
  • Subsidy starting to work for penguinbuilder

Data Sources

Data sources used in this research:

  • eden-data-public.ethereum_auxiliary.tags_pubkey
  • eden-data-public.mev_boost.payloads
  • bigquery-public-data.crypto_ethereum.transactions
  • bigquery-public-data.crypto_ethereum.blocks
  • bigquery-public-data.crypto_ethereum.traces

Learn more about Eden Public Datasets

3 Likes
2

Will it be possible at some point to query bid/payload data older than a month on bigquery?

3

Hey,

reach out on our Eden Newtork discord under #public-data and we can discuss, definetly possible.

Discord link:

1 Like