MEV-Boost Status Update - 2022-11-03

The Flashbots Ship Flashbots Status Updates
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Quick summary of what’s currently happening in and around MEV-Boost, as of Nov. 3, 2022.

Upcoming release of mev-boost v1.4.0

EIP 4844

Updated getValidator relay data API

Profit-switching for the beacon node (WIP)

See also [RFC] Engine API: Add block value in response to engine_getPayload execution-apis#307 (geth PR)

Block scoring standard & Payment proofs (ongoing discussion)

Ongoing discussions [2] about how to define the “bid value”.

Current options that are discussed:

  1. Payment transaction at the end of the block
  2. Proposer balance different before/after the block

Main considerations include:

  • Representation of “additional value provided to the proposer over a local EL block”
  • Ability for adding payment proofs to the bid, which reflect that score and can be verified by mev-boost

Inclusion lists (ongoing research)

Ongoing research on about adding inclusion lists, both outside and inside mev-boost.

There’s several open questions, including authorization of setting an inclusion list for a proposer/slot, timing of sending the IL, and ability to verify successful inclusion and valid exclusion reasons inside mev-boost.

See also:

Allowing SSZ encoded payloads (in addition to JSON)

Currently, the beacon node communicates with the builder network exclusively with JSON payloads. SSZ encoded payloads would increase encoding and decoding performance significantly, and reliably shave off hundreds of milliseconds off the request roundtrips.

See also:

SSE subscription to trigger block building (stagnant)

Currently, block builders depend on a custom Prysm fork to trigger block production as soon as all parameters are available.

This could also be a simple SSE subscription on the beacon node.

See also SSE subscription for newPayload event to trigger block building · Issue #244 · ethereum/beacon-APIs · GitHub

Relays

Eight relays have been delivering payloads in the last 24 hours:

Relay Payloads (24h)
boost-relay.flashbots.net 4503
bloxroute.max-profit.blxrbdn.com 669
relay.edennetwork.io 259
bloxroute.ethical.blxrbdn.com 221
builder-relay-mainnet.blocknative.com 184
bloxroute.regulated.blxrbdn.com 101
mainnet-relay.securerpc.com 49
relayooor.wtf 41

(Source: Data API on the relays)

Note: multiple relays can deliver the same payload for a given slot (i.e. when a builder sends a winning bid to multiple relays).

Flashbots Relay

At the time of writing, 83.3% of validators are running mev-boost connected to the Flashbots mainnet relay (382,719 out of 459,190). Here’s a chart of active validators over the past four weeks:

active validators over past four weeks
active validators over past four weeks1665×465 23.8 KB

Builders

The Flashbots relay receives 300 bids from 30 builders for any given slot on average. These are builders who submitted more than 100 winning payloads (landed on chain) in the last 7 days:

Builder Blocks (7d) Operator
0xb194b2…3027 6937 builder0x69
0xa1dead…27fc 4628 Flashbots
0x81babe…80f9 4249 Flashbots
0x81beef…994f 3507 Flashbots
0xa4fb63…6772 2448 builder0x69
0x80c731…d3d5 1753 bloXroute
0xa1daf0…14e9 1213
0x94aa4e…7c67 1204 bloXroute
0x976e63…6013 1187 bloXroute
0x96a59d…fc27 1081 beaverbuild.org
0x8eb772…8ad0 359 eth-builder.com
0xb8fcee…e899 316 builder0x69
0x91afe2…945a 190
0x8b8edc…5fba 157 bloXroute
0xa30251…d5b8 117
0x987ff8…bb99 112
0x8d6e6c…3efd 106

(Source: Flashbots Relay Data API)

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The Flashbots relay now also provides bulk data exports of both delivered payloads (~150k) and builder block submissions (~36M at time of writing):