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
- TimeBoost: Do Ahead-of-Time Auctions Work? by Akaki Mamageishvili, @Christoph, Ko Sunghun, Jinsuk Park, Ali Taslimi study the performance of the TimeBoost auction by comparing cumulative fixed time markout of fast lane trades over the TimeBoost interval to bids for the fast lane.
- Dynamic Penalties for ePBS by @Christoph and @BrunoMr proposes dynamic penalties as an improvement to the current ePBS design, preventing free option exercise in all but the most extreme cases.
- The Evolution of Remote Attested TLS by @peg describes how approaches to remote attested TLS have changed over time, and outlines standardization efforts and design trade-offs.
- Post by @metachris
- The Walls Have Ears: Unveiling Cross-Chain Sandwich Attacks in DeFi by Chuanlei Li, Zhicheng Sun, Jing Xin Yuu, and Xuechao Wang investigates cross-chain sandwich attacks and exposes vulnerabilities in bridges that allow attackers to frontrun cross-chain swaps.
- Simultaneous Bidding in Sealed-Bid Auctions by Silvio Sorbera analyzes a model of competing sealed-bid first-price, and second-price auctions where bidders have unit demand and can bid on multiple auctions simultaneously.
- Making Ethereum Feel Like One Chain Again by Yoav Weiss details how Ethereum Interop Layer (EIL) enables seamless cross-chain execution by embedding interop logic into user wallets, without adding new trust assumptions or reliance on off-chain infrastructure.
- Finality Is in the Eye of the Behodler by Ittai Abraham, Vitalik Buterin, and Luca Zanolini explores various types of blockchain finality, and argues that finality is conditional, subjective, and accumulates strength over time based on social consensus.
- The Latency Cost Of Censorship Resistance by Ittai Abraham, Yuval Efron, and Ling Ren show that any consensus protocol guaranteeing censorship resistance must incur a cost of two additional rounds of latency, compared to traditional Byzantine Broadcast.
- State Locks as Proposer Commitments by Tim Mainwaring presents a design for state locks that enable proposers to offer deterministic access to specified storage slots within a block.
- State growth scenarios and the impact of repricings by Maria Inês Silva present a model to simulate Ethereum state expansion under different gas limit scenarios, and quantify the effects of repricing state-related gas costs.
- Integrated in-protocol distributed history and state storage by Vitalik Buterin presents a mechanism to store Ethereum history in blobs, and verify them using DAS and ZK proofs.
- Trustless payments: right vibe, more trust? by Alexander Tesfamichael examines how trustless payments in ePBS may unintentionally centralize block building into more private, trusted relationships between proposers and a few dominant builders.
- Backup Sequencing: Strengthening OP Mainnet Reliability with Sunnyside Labs by Sunnyside Labs details the integration of their backup sequencer for OP Mainnet using op-conductor to strengthen uptime guarantees.
- Why RISC-V Is Not a Good Choice for an L1 Delivery ISA, and Why WASM Is a Better One by Ed Felten argues against enshrining RISC-V as Ethereum’s ISA and contends that WASM is a more suitable choice.
Posts & Threads
- Toni Wahrstätter published a post highlighting that the block gas limit has reached 60M.
- Post by Vitalik Buterin
- Post by @dataalways
- Toni Wahrstätter published a post detailing how the introduction of BALs in Glamsterdam will scale Ethereum by enabling parallel transaction execution.
Talks & Discussions
- Recordings from ETHDay hosted by Ethereum Foundation:
- Ethereum Update by Tomasz K. Stańczak
- Ethereum Foundation & Ethereum Update by Hsiao Wei Wang
- Ethereum (Roadmap) in 30min by Vitalik Buterin
- Ethereum Protocol Update Scale Blobs by Ansgar Dietrichs and Barnabé Monnot
- Trillion Dollar Security Initiative by Fredrik Svantes and Mehdi Zerouali
- Ethereum Ecosystem Overview by Jason Chaskin
- L2 Panel Discussion with Alex Gluchowski, dcbuilder.eth, Declan Fox, Jesse Pollak, Joshua Rudolf, Mark Tyneway, Oren Katz and Steven Goldfeder
- Thread by Devconnect ARG
- Recordings from trustless:// hosted by Ethereum Foundation:
- Making Ethereum Feel Like One Chain Again by Yoav Weiss
- Understanding EIL: A Deep Dive by Shahaf Nacson
- Trustlessness Is The Standard: The Ethereum Interop Layer by Marissa Posner
- Why Trustlessness Now? by Vitalik Buterin
- Fireside Chat - The Trustless Manifesto with Vitalik Buterin, Yoav Weiss, Marissa Posner, and Tom Teman
- FOCIL: Restoring Censorship Resistance on Ethereum by Thomas Thiery
- Interop Risk Framework by L2BEAT by Bartek Kiepuszewski
- Opening by Marissa Posner
- Open Intents in Patagonia by Barnabé Monnot
- Trust-Minimized Interop with EIL by Yoav Weiss
- Chain Abstraction with the OIF by Jim Chang
- User-Centric Interoperability by Steven Goldfeder
- Cross-chain apps powered by real-time proving by Orest Tarasiuk
- Composable Batching by Mislav Javor
- CoW Swap’s Multiparty Exec and Cross-Chain Coordination by Alex Vinas
- Fireside Chat: Trustlessness, Interop, and Ethereum’s Future with Marissa Posner and Tomasz K. Stańczak
- Panel: Interop protocols: who do you have to trust? with Yoav Weiss, Bartek Kiepuszewski, Peter Watts, and Hart Lambur
- Panel: Agentic intents with Joshua Rudolf, Shaw Walters, Davide Crapis, and Kanishk Khurana
- Workshop: Open Intents Framework Overview and Demo by Pepe Blasco
- Workshop: Effortless DeFi: Extending the EIL SDK by Ofir Eliasi and Ivo Georgiev
- Workshop: Building with EIL by Dror Tirosh, Alex Forshtat and Shahaf Nacson
- Workshop: Faster canonical bridges with multi-proofs by Paul Dowman
- Workshop: The Art of AMM by Anton Bukov
- Workshop: How to build a Stage 2 Ethereum Rollup by Tom Lehman
- Recordings from Defi Security Summit:
- Insecurity Through Obscurity: Veiled Vulnerabilities in Closed-Source Contracts by @syang
- Ethereum: Trillion Dollar Security by Fredrik Svantes
- Stopping Multisig MEV with Harbour by John Ennis
- Economic Censorship Games in Fraud Proofs by Ben Berger
- Secure if True: Proving Security with TEE Attestations by Jack Kearney
- Panel: Security of L1 vs L2s with Usmann Khan, Jan Gorzny, Vlad Bochok, Daniel Lumi and Bartek Kiepuszewski
- Recordings from Bankless Summit II hosted by Bankless:
- Recordings from Agentic Zero:
- Panel: The Trust Layer in the Agentic Stack: ERC-8004 with Marco de Rossi, Sumeet Chougulem, Davide Crapis, @Quintus and Simon Emanuel
- Panel: DeFi as an Agent Playground with Ken Ng, Stefano Bury, Gauthier Vila, Lukasz Stoczynski, and Valentin Mihov
- Panel: Agents Under the Hood: Building the Agentic Stack with Nicoás Montone, Clemens Wan, Juan Irungaray, Nader Dabit and Chris Wessels
- Livestream recording from Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 2 hosted by Web3Privacy with presentations and panels on topics related to privacy.
- Livestream recording from Frontier Forum hosted by SpaceComputer with presentations and panels exploring the future frontiers of Web3.
- The Rollup TV: Devconnect Day 1 with Jamal, Zac Williamson, Luca Donno, YQ, Sam Battenally, Luca Prosperi, Devin Walsh, Haonan Li, Réka Medvecz, Dino, Kevin Cha, Jill Gunter, and Alex Cutler and David Phelps.
- Post by The Rollup
- The Rollup TV: Devconnect Day 2 with Oren Katz, DeFi Dave, Dankrad Feist, Stani Kulechov, MonetSupply, Alex Gluchowski, Mariana Kotit, Mike Silagadze, Ansgar Dietrichs, Camila Russo, Paul Frambot, Nick White, @Quintus Sean Li, Juan David Mendieta and Thiru.
- Post by The Rollup
- The Rollup TV: Devconnect Day 3 with Lane Retting, Mats Olsen, Declan Fox, Mark Tyneway, Eli Haims, Mike Hanono, William Reilly, Abril Zucchi, Steven Goldfeder, AJ Warner, Peter Watts and Parker Edwards.
- The Fusaka Files: Increased Wallet Support with EIP-7951 in Fusaka invites Alex Stokes to explain how EIP-7951 in Fusaka improves wallet UX by adding a precompile to support the Secp256r1 curve.
- CBER Forum: Rising Stars of Cryptoeconomics invites Aviv Yaish, Fayçal Drissi, Boyang Mu, Gustavo Grivol, and Brian Zhu to present research in cryptoeconomics.
Other
- Ignition Chain by Aztec details the launch of Aztec Network’s consensus layer with decentralized sequencing.
- The Anoma protocol adapter is live on Ethereum by Christopher Goes announces the launch of the Anoma Protocol Adapter, enabling the execution of intent-centric and privacy-preserving Rust-applications on Ethereum.
- Nov 3 Exploit Post-Mortem by Balancer details the exploit of Balancer V2’s Composable Stable Pools on November 3 2025, that led to a $94.8M in losses.
- EIP-8079: Native rollups by Luca Donno and Justin Drake introduces a new execute precompile that allows rollups to reuse Ethereum’s state transition verification infrastructure to simplify their infrastructure and upgrade processes.
- Full Send by Spire introduces an RPC using DA Builder designed for fast inclusion, MEV protection, and revert protection.
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