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
- Proof of Cloud: Data Center Execution Assurance for Confidential VMs by @rezabfil, @Moe, @socrates1024, Stefan Genchev, @Quintus, Georg Carle, and @jonathan introduces Data Center Execution Assurance (DCEA) as a method to extend remote attestation for Confidential VMs by cryptographically binding the CVM execution to verifiable cloud infrastructure.
- Conditional Recall by @Christoph and @sxysun demonstrates how selective forgetting through conditional recall unlocks new mechanism design for information markets, bargaining, and more.
- TEE.fail: Breaking Trusted Execution Environments via DDR5 Memory Bus Interposition by Jalen Chuang, Alex Seto, Nicolas Berrios, Stephan van Schaik, Christina Garman, and Daniel Genkin demonstrates how modern TEE implementations by Intel and AMD can be compromised using a low-cost device to physically inspect all memory traffic in the server.
- Post by Daniel Genkin
- Thread by @Quintus
- Post by @socrates1024
- Why TEE.fail is bullish for BuilderNet: Hardening the Path to Permissionless Blockbuilding by @Quintus details why wiretap.fail, battering RAM and TEE.fail are not applicable to BuilderNet or any Flashbots products and do not enable frontrunning or unbundling.
- Phala’s Statement on DDR5 Memory Bus Interposition Vulnerability by Phala explains why TEE.fail does not affect Phala Cloud’s operating infrastructure, and details efforts to standardize Proof-of-Cloud as an industry-wide trust framework.
- Thread by Phala
- Post by Marvin Tong
- T-time attack analysis by @igor analyzes the impact of the T-Time attack on Flashbots products, concluding that none of the current TEE products are directly impacted.
- Prop AMMs vs. RFQs: The Importance of Composability by @optimus outlines why RFQ-based systems are efficient for simple swaps but insufficient for onchain composability, whereas prop-AMMs enable more complex, atomic DeFi strategies.
- The Bidding Games: Reinforcement Learning for MEV Extraction on Polygon Blockchain by Andrei Seoev, Leonid Gremyachikh, Anastasiia Smirnova, Yash Madhwal, Alisa Kalacheva, Dmitry Belousov, Ilia Zubov, Aleksei Smirnov, Denis Fedyanin, Vladimir Gorgadze, and Yury Yanovich presents a reinforcement learning framework for optimizing sealed-bid strategies in the Atlas auction on Polygon.
- Private Liquidity: Ethereum’s Most Understudied Layer by Barter analyzes how the rise of Private Market Makers (PMMs) is impacting the DEX landscape, and how it compares to prop-AMMs.
- I think it’s ok to allow stage 1 rollups shorter withdrawal windows (1-2 days), but we should be more conservative on stage 2 by Vitalik Buterin explains the rationale of the 7-day withdrawal window in optimistic rollups, and proposes a conditional 1–2 day window for stage 1 rollups.
- Post by Vitalik Buterin
- Reply by Potuz
- The Future of State, Part 1: OOPSIE - A new type of Snap Sync-based wallet/lightclient by CPerezz introduces a wallet architecture that lets wallets hold and verify their own subset of Ethereum’s state to improve privacy, and reduce dependence on centralized RPC providers.
- The Future of State, Part 2: Beyond The Myth of Partial Statefulness & The Reality Of ZKEVMs by CPerezz argues that partial statefulness in Ethereum is economically unsustainable, and would require new incentive mechanisms to prevent centralization.
- Multi-constraint pricing by Ed Felten explains Arbitrum’s current gas pricing model and proposes a new multi-constraint approach to better balance short- and long-term resource limits.
- Post by Ed Felten
- Post by Akaki Mamageishvili
- Why we should prioritize repricings in Glamsterdam by Marius van der Wijden advocates for prioritizing gas repricing EIPs in Glamsterdam, emphasizing their expected impact on scalability, and relative ease of implementation.
Posts & Threads
- ladislaus.eth published a thread sharing publications and collaborations by EF Research from the previous week.
- Derek published a video demoing the integration of Flashblocks in the WalletConnect interface.
Talks & Discussions
- PEEPanEIP: EIP-7594: PeerDAS - Peer Data Availability Sampling invites Francesco D’Amato for a walk-through of PeerDAS, and future directions for data availability on Ethereum.
- Deeply Intents: Solving Interop with Intents invites Jim for a conversation on intents, orderflow, cross-chain MEV, and more.
- All Core Devs - Consensus (ACDC) #168 hosted by Alex Stokes covered updates from BPO-forks on testnets, confirmed Fusaka mainnet dates, and discussed non-headliner EIPs for Glamsterdam.
- All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #60 hosted by Barnabas Busa discussed updates from Fusaka on devnets, final client releases for mainnet, gas limit testing, and more.
- FOCIL Breakout #23 hosted by Jihoon Song covered FOCIL testing and implementation updates.
Other
- TEEs on-chain by @Quintus shares a collection of projects using onchain TEE registries for transparency and governance.
- MEV-Boost v1.10 by Flashbots has been released as a required update for the upcoming Fusaka upgrade.
- Ethereum Blob Scaling by Alex Stokes tracks the blob scaling progress, and calculates rollup TPS as a function of blob throughput.
- Post by Alex Stokes
- Glamsterdam EIP Tier Maker by Forkcast is an interactive tier list tool for the Glamsterdam candidate EIPs.
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