Ideas for Incentivizing Relays

Relays
1

It’s currently a problem that we do not have more relays, especially from organizations in differing geographies. But as it stands relays are not cheap and there is no incentive to run one unless you’re also a builder.

Could we:

  1. Crowdfund and create grants for new relays? Could also work with all current relays to open source knowledge on operation and infrastructure. It would seem in the best interest of validator pools to fund such grants.
  2. Normalize relays taking profit? This would most likely require unilateral agreement on fees to charge as the most stable equilibrium is 0% right now.
  3. Use relay enforced builder staking to generate yield.
  4. Other ideas?
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Any resource about the cost of running a relay?

3

Service-wise, for a redundant and scalable setup, you’ll probably want these:

  1. Load balancer + Firewall
  2. 2x proposer API (4 CPU, 1GB RAM)
  3. 2x builder API (2-4 CPU, 1GB RAM)
  4. 2x data API (1 CPU, 1GB RAM)
  5. 2x website (1 CPU, 2GB RAM)
  6. 1x housekeeper (2 CPU, 1GB RAM)
  7. Redis (1GB)
  8. Postgres DB (100GB+)
  9. A bunch of beacon-nodes (3 for redundancy?)
  10. Block validation EL nodes
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So based on that set up its around $20k USD per year, which wouldn’t include networking costs or a staging environment. On top of that operators would most likely expect some type of compensation so 2-3x’ing the cost to $40-60k doesn’t seem outlandish.

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I’m not too up to date on DAO treasury grant sizes, but this certainly seems feasible!

5

Additional ‘fully loaded’ costs to consider:

  • Ongoing maintenance – non-trivial in an emerging/rapidly evolving category
  • Driving (and maintaining) validator adoption – i.e. the ‘build it and they will come’ fallacy
  • Bandwidth
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6

Would add to that the cost of 24/7 devops coverage in case there are any errors

7

Fwiw, I’ve updated the RAM requirements in the post above, which significantly dropped after recent updates to flashbots/mev-boost-relay.

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8

I just noticed this part from watching video,so will relay still exist if PBS is alive,if builder and proposer can’t conduct a block bypass PBS, what’s the meaning to incentive relay?

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We effectively have opt-in Proposer-builder separation today with MEV-Boost. The interactions between proposers and builders is and performed off-protocol thought and requires a trusted relay inbetween.

After in-protocol PBS has been implemented these relays will no longer be needed. This development may take several years though and until then we need a healthy diversity of relays.

1 Like
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Resurrecting this thread! :sunrise_over_mountains:
Especially in light of Blocknative having to shut down their relay operations.

Possibly gitcoin grants to support? (Not great, but it is a start…)

What would this entail?

Also, thinking out loud, something like ‘RelayDAO’, to support an initiative around this?
To enable equitable distribution and coordination, at least until in-protocol PBS.

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Hey, my team and I have some ideas about different mechanisms that we want to try out for non-deficit relays. Do you have any resources to test them?

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I’m currently working on this :slight_smile: . To me a relayer can be interpreted as public excludable good. So make sense to apply mechanisms from cost-sharing literature.

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Hey @BrunoMr That sounds interesting. Could you provide more details on what kind of mechanisms you have mind? What kind of data would be needed to run it? Who would run the mechanism?

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Are there any synergies with block builders? Eg. Would a relay be able to help make a block builder more competitive?

If so, maybe some sort of profit sharing agreement would be worth looking in to.

If there’s a funding incentive, we’ll run a relay. So it’s not the infra setup + DevOps as the bottleneck now.