The MEV Letter is a weekly collection of papers, articles and resources related to MEV. The intention of this letter is to provide a comprehensive summary of the latest research, discussions, and developments in the space, with links for further reading.
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Papers & Articles
- The Free Option Problem of ePBS by @BrunoMr, @boz1, @Christoph, and Fei Wu presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the free option problem in ePBS, where builders can withhold payloads and blobs after commitment, degrading liveness without incurring an additional penalty.
- Decoupling ExecutionPayload validity from Data Availability by Mike Neuder details how decoupling ExecutionPayload validity from blob availability, as described in dual-deadline PTC vote in ePBS by Anders Elowsson, would mitigate the long free opinion problem in ePBS.
- TEEs Are The Worst They’ll Ever Be by @Quintus presents a forward-looking case for TEEs, citing advancements in hardware security research, open-source secure hardware, and synergistic use with FHE.
- Forum post by @Quintus
- Thread by @Quintus
- Rethinking Ethereum’s Geography: How Protocol Shapes Where Validators Run by @syang shares results from Designing Ethereum’s Geographical (De)Centralization Beyond the Atlantic by @syang, @boz1, Fei Wu, and Fan Zhang, analyzing the impact of protocol design on geographical decentralization.
- SoK: Preconfirmations by Aikaterini-Panagiota Stouka, Conor McMenamin, Demetris Kyriacou, and Quentin Botha details the terms and definitions related to preconfirmations, outlines a general framework for preconfirmation protocols, and explores the economics and risks associated.
- Peer Exchanges by PropellerHeads makes the case for TEE-based, intent-driven peer exchanges to mitigate the risk of censorship, rent-seeking, and MEV extracted by intermediaries.
Posts & Threads
- @Quintus published a post highlighting that TEEs are not static but an evolving technology, and details ongoing efforts to advance open source secure hardware.
- Reply by NeverLocal
- ethPandaOps published a thread highlighting the successful launch of Fusaka on the Holešky testnet, and upcoming steps towards mainnet.
- Will Corcoran published a thread sharing recordings, slides, and other resources from the PQ workshop in Cambridge hosted by the Ethereum Foundation.
- smstack.eth published a thread investigating the relatively high revert rate on Arbitrum, and why Timeboost fails to disincentivize spam from searchers.
- ladislaus.eth published a thread sharing publications and collaborations by EF Research from the previous week.
- @metachris published a post announcing that Relayscan now supports JSON output for various time intervals.
Talks & Discussions
- L2 Demo Day September 25, 2023 by @dmarz highlights a series of new demos that showcase recent developments in Rollup-Boost, op-rbuilder, Contender, and more.
- Deeply Intents: DeFi is the Future of Ethereum invites Nikita for a conversation on DEX design, solvers, and Barter.
- Deeply Intents - Episode 25: Respect the Graph invites Shoaib Ahmed to discuss intents, TEEs, one-shot signatures, Cycles, and more.
- The Ethereum Foundation on its Mission to Solve Interop invites Joshua Rudolf and Barnabé Monnot for a conversation on Ethereum Foundation’s strategic initiatives, cross-chain interoperability, and the Open Intents Framework.
- Post by LI.FI
- Post by Arjun Chand
- All Core Devs - Consensus (ACDC) #166 hosted by Alex Stokes discussed Fusaka testnet activations, and progress on Glamsterdam devnets.
- All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #56 hosted by parithosh covered updates from the Fusaka activation on Holešky, 60M gas limit testing, and Glamsterdam headliners.
- L2 Interop Working Group Call #15 hosted by Joshua Rudolf discussed Fast Synchronous Finality, ENS-based chain registry, synchronous cross‑rollup composability, and more.
- Notes by Joshua Rudolf
- Post by Joshua Rudolf
- ZK Podcast: Verifiable Key Management and TEEs with Turnkey invites Arnaud Brousseau and Jack Kearney for a conversation on remote attestations, reproducible builds, and verifiable key management using TEEs.
Other
- WireTap: Breaking Server SGX via DRAM Bus Interposition by Alex Seto, Oytun Kuday Duran, Samy Amer, Jalen Chuang, Stephan van Schaik, Daniel Genkin, and Christina Garman demonstrates how Intel SGX’s security can be compromised by a low-cost device that physically monitors memory traffic to extract the secret attestation key.
- Searcher Competition in Block Building by Akaki Mamageishvili, @Christoph, Benny Sudakov, and @sui414 has been updated with an extension of the baseline model with one proposer to multiple concurrent proposers.
- Fusaka bandwidth estimation by parithosh and Sam Calder-Mason shares observations from Fusaka activation on the Holešky testnet, with a focus on PeerDAS and blob propagation.
- Checkpoint #6: Oct 2025 by nixo.eth gives a high-level summary from recent All Core Developer calls, focusing on Fusaka testnets, gas limit increases, and Glamsterdam planning.
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