Development next steps for PBS, roundtable at DevCon

[guayabyte]

Hosts

@guayabyte, @kailin, @jtraglia and @ralexstokes

Date

October 14th, 2 pm to 5 pm, Bogotá Time.

Venue

Hilton Corferias, Rocío Room
A small working space with limited seating.

Attendees

Invitation only. If you want to participate, contact @kailin.

• 1 or 2 developers from every consensus and execution client team.
• 10 seats for developers, testers and security researchers from Ethereum Foundation.
• 5 seats for people from other organizations who have collaborated with mev-boost and PBS.

Proposed agenda

• Present the current status of the MEV-Boost architecture and the adoption numbers. 15 minutes.
• Summary of the open research questions for PBS. 15 minutes.
• Development next steps for decentralization and censorship resistance. 1 hour 30 minutes.
• Security risks and mitigations. 1 hour.

[kailin]

2 invitees to add interested in contributing from Blocknative:

Murat Akdeniz (@muralight - product manager) and Taylor Dawson (@drapier - engineer)

[kailin]

Flashbots met with Ethereum ecosystem partners and contributors of MEV-Boost during DevCon Bogotá to align on decentralizing proposer/builder separation as a community. Below is a summary of discussed priorities, updates since Devcon, and next steps we’ll continue to collaborate toward. Please comment with any additional updates or information!

Summary of Priorities

• Inclusion list / partial block auction implementation
• Block scoring and payment proofs
• Local and remote block comparison
• Relay Monitor
• Consequences for misbehavior relays
• SSZ encoding
• MEV-Boost security audit
• ValidatorRegistration and Data API Privacy

Updates Since Devcon

• Flashbots continues to maintain MEV-Boost via an ‘open R&D’ process, where releases and updates will be shared openly on the Flashbots Forum.
• We are iterating on inclusion list or partial block auction design decisions which ideally will not require consensus client integration.
• We’ve doubled the boost-relay builder block submission rate limit to 600/5min (2/sec), which is pretty optimal for block builders.
• Announced mev-boost-relay v0.11.0 - notable feature: block submission cancellations.
• We’ve open sourced our sync-proxy, which allows EL clients (i.e. geth, nethermind, etc.) to be driven by multiple beacon nodes for greater redundancy.

Community Updates

• Prysm (Terence) and Geth (Marius) prototyping features to enable the proposer to select between a local block and a builder block with the highest fee.
• New relay and builder entrants: The @Rook relay undergoing load testing, Builder0x69 considering entering.
• BloXRoute discussion regarding validator specified censorship.
• Forum: A Full-Block-Censoring FlashBots Relay For Censorship-Sensitive Proposers

Requested Next Steps

• Continue discussion on incentivizing relays to increase competition.
• Align on the standardization of block scoring and adding bid proofs to the builder bid response https://collective.flashbots.net/t/block-scoring-for-mev-boost-relays/202/16.
• Continue iteration of inclusion list or partial block auction design decisions by answering open questions.
• Contribute toward the MEV-Boost development philosophy.
• Implement the changes required for local and remote block building comparison.
• Review the inclusion list proposal: How much can we constrain builders without bringing back heavy burdens to proposers?

Resources

• Vitalik’s ETHResearch Post: How much can we constrain builders without bringing back heavy burdens to proposers?
• Forum: Toward an open research and development process for MEV-Boost
• Forum: MEV-Boost Development Philosophy
• Forum: Ideas for Incentivizing Relays
• Forum: Privacy Concerns with Data API