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.
- Explore all previous editions via The MEV Letter explorer.
Papers & Articles
- A Consensus Layer Client Diversity Snapshot by @dataalways analyzes CL client diversity among proposers connected to the Flashbots MEV-Boost Relay, and how market shares has evolved throughout the year.
- Post by @dataalways
- How the MEV Supply Chain Reacts to Circuit Breakers by @dataalways details the consequences of the Prysm client failure following the Fusaka upgrade which caused missed slots, a fallback to local block production, and transactions being routed to the public mempool.
- Post by @dataalways
- Prop AMMs on EVM: A Proof of Concept by @optimus outlines an architecture for an EVM-based Prop AMM that introduces a priority lane in the builder logic to execute Top-of-Block price updates before swaps.
- An Observation on Ethereum’s Blockspace Market by Kubi Mensah, Alexander Tesfamichael, Kevin Lepsoe, and Justin Drake analyzes how Ethereum’s blockspace market has evolved under PBS, highlights current inefficiencies, and outlines ten principles to evolve the market and address emerging challenges.
- Post by Kubi Mensah
- Post by Gattaca
- Thread by Drew Van der Werff
- Post by Fede’s intern
- Post by Michael Moser
- Post by binji
- DPaaS: Improving Decentralization by Removing Relays in Ethereum PBS by Chenyang Liu, Ittai Abraham, Matthew Lentz, and Kartik Nayak presents a backward-compatible alternative to MEV-Boost that replaces centralized relays with a fault-tolerant network of TEEs.
- Blog post by Chenyang Liu, Ittai Abraham, Matthew Lentz, and Kartik Nayak
- Post by Kartik Nayak
- The Future of Ethereum’s State by Wei Han Ng, Carlos Pérez, and Stateless Consensus outlines the challenges posed by Ethereum’s expanding state size and explores solutions, including stateless validation and state expiry, to ensure long-term scalability, decentralization, and censorship resistance.
- Aligning incentives with the Sunrise Pact by oastedsteaksandwich recounts a searcher’s year-long journey of capturing hourly emissions from Beanstalk, including setting up cooperative onchain pacts with other searchers, until the strategy eventually collapsed into a race to 0.
- Preconfirmations, Flashblocks, Shreds: How Blockchains Become Faster Than 1 Second by Krzysztof Gogol explores how chains are reducing their transaction confirmation times through preconfirmations, Flashblocks, shreds, and other techniques.
- Introducing the Universal Enshrined Encrypted Mempool EIP by Shutter introduces EIP-8105 as a method to send transactions to an encrypted mempool, designed to eliminate front-running, sandwich attacks, and real-time censorship.
- Forum post by Jannik Luhn
- Thread by Shutter
- Post by Primev
- Getting Ethereum Ready for GigaGas by Kamil Chodoła, Ben Adams, Marek Moraczynski, and Carlos Bermudez presents Execution Payloads Benchmarks by Nethermind as a client-agnostic benchmarking framework for stress-testing EL clients using real mainnet data.
- Thread by Nethermind
- what happened to based sequencing? is sync. composability still a thing? by JĂĽnger reflects on the evolution, challenges, and ongoing developments in the based sequencing ecosystem.
- Stage 1 requirements update: Security Council walkaway test by donnoh.eth proposes stricter requirements for rollups to reach Stage 1 by disallowing the active use of the security council to provide censorship resistance, liveness and safety guarantees under non-emergency.
- LIF: The Lean Intent Framework by Bo Du presents Lean Intent Framework by Polymer Labs as a solver-centric alternative to the Open Intents Framework.
Posts & Threads
-
Akaki Mamageishvili published a post detailing an update to On Sybil-proof Mechanisms by Minghao Pan, Bruno Mazorra, Christoph Schlegel, and Akaki Mamageishvili. .
-
Ethereum.org published a thread, authored by Rajeev, on how the Fusaka upgrade improves scalability without sacrificing security to establish Ethereum as civilizational trustware.
-
Toni Wahrstätter published a post announcing that the first devnet for BALs has launched.
-
ladislaus.eth published a thread providing an update from Protocol at Ethereum Foundation on zkEVMs, gas repricing, post-quantum signature aggregation, and more.
Talks & Discussions
- Recordings from Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress 2 hosted by Web3Privacy has been uploaded:
- Making Silicon Cypherpunk by @ahmed and @Quintus
- Data Liberation & Adversarial Interop with TEE and OAuth3 by @socrates1024
- Integrating Tor into Ethereum with Vitalik Buterin and Roger Dingledine
- DeFi Punk by Hsiao Wei Wang
- Panel: From Tornado Cash to future developers protection with Fatemeh Fannisadeh, Marina Markezic, Ayanfeoluwa Olajide, Joan ArĂşs and Beth McCarthy
- Ethereum Privacy Roadmap by Andy Guzman
- Kohaku: Wallet privacy on Ethereum by Vitalik Buterin, Nicolas Consigny and kassandra.eth
- Fireside Chat with Vitalik Buterin and Naomi Brockwell
- Thread by Web3Privacy
- CBER Forum: Quantitative Strategies in Uniswap v3 by Evgeny Lyandres details research on quantitative strategies in Uniswap v3.
- CBER Forum: Structural Analysis of MEV Boost Auctions’ by Mallesh Pai presents work analyzing how integrated searcher-builders outcompete neutral builders through CEX/DEX arbitrage.
- CBER Forum: A Structural Model of AMMs by David Cao describes research on structural modelling of AMMs.
- All Core Devs - Consensus (ACDC) #171 hosted by Alex Stokes covered updates from the BPO1-fork, Glamsterdam testing, FOCIL, headliners for Hegotá, and more.
- All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #64 hosted by Barnabas Busa discussed BPO-forks, devnets for BALs and ePBS, and more.
- FOCIL Breakout #25 hosted by Jihoon Song covered FOCIL testing and implementation updates.
- Agenda by Jihoon Song
- Thread by Jihoon Song
- EIP-7928 Breakout #9 hosted by Toni Wahrstätter covered specification changes and client implementations related to BALs.
- Deeply Intents: Ethereum Has a Censorship Problem. Here is the Fix invites Thomas Thiery for a deep dive into FOCIL, censorship resistance, and the EIP process.
- Thread by apriori
- Post by Thomas Thiery
- 0age on The Compact: Reusable Resource Locks for Cross-Chain Intents invites 0age to discuss how The Compact by Uniswap Labs enables reusable resource locks for tokens to be credibly committed in exchange for performing actions across chains.
Other
- Fusaka Mainnet Prysm Incident by Prysm details the Prysm incident following the Fusaka upgrade on mainnet where nearly all Prysm nodes experienced a resource exhaustion event, resulting in missed blocks and attestations.
- Post by Terence Tsao
- History of a buggy bug by Potuz analyzes the bug in Prysm that caused attestation validation errors and DoS vulnerabilities after the Fusaka upgrade.
- Ethproofs 2025 Review & 2026 Roadmap by Fara Woolf and Will Corcoran outlines Ethproofs role in coordinating and benchmarking zkVM and prover performance for Ethereum L1 block proving.
- Africa on the MEV Map by @wisdom examines why Africa remains underrepresented in Ethereum block production and proposes steps to increase activity and make geographical disparities easier to track.
- FRP for Busy Nerds by @wisdom is an alternative interface for exploring Flashbots Research Proposals (FRPs).
Sign up here if you’d like to get The MEV Letter straight to your inbox!
Explore previous editions via The MEV Letter explorer
Join Flashbots