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
- Leveraging Blockchain in a New Era of Antitrust @ryager, Samuel Vance-Law, @fiiiu, and Connor Spelliscy detail how blockchain and confidential computing offer structural advantages to promote competitive, transparent and fair markets, using Intercontinental Exchange’s vertical integration and DoJ v. Google ad-auction as case studies.
- Forum post by @ryager
- Thread by @ryager
- Recursive-STARK-based bandwidth-efficient mempool by Vitalik Buterin outlines a bandwidth-constant scheme using recursive STARKs to aggregate and propagate object validity across mempool nodes and builders in post-quantum Ethereum.
- Solving Ethereum’s Fragmentation Problem With Sync Composability by Alon Muroch presents Ethereum Single Execution Environment (eSEE) as a synchronous composability solution for Ethereum’s rollup ecosystem.
- Post by Alon Muroch
- Our Roadmap for 2026 by Andrew Davis, Sam Calder-Mason, Matty Evans, pk910, Rafael Matias, Stefan, Barnabas Busa, and parithosh outlines the role of ethPandaOps in coordinating forks, building tooling and data pipelines, and details the initiatives that will define their work in 2026.
- Post by ethPandaOps
- Post by Matty Evans
- From Block Position to AI-Driven DeFi: Lessons from the IC3 Research Retreat by Krzysztof Gogol reflects on insights from the IC3 Winter Retreat 2026 related to MEV, emerging DeFi trends, AI-driven coordination, and more.
Posts & Threads
- @ryager published a thread highlighting 5 proposed rules in the Senate Banking market structure draft and evaluates their potential regulatory implications on DeFi.
- Vitalik Buterin published a post arguing that increasing bandwidth through PeerDAS and ZKPs is a safer and more scalable approach than reducing L1 latency, and emphasizes L2s for low-latency use cases.
- Vitalik Buterin published a post describing how Ethereum must eventually meet the “walkaway test” and operate indefinitely without requiring further protocol upgrades or ongoing maintenance.
- Bartek Kiepuszewski published a thread exploring the design of Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) as a trust-minimized protocol for cross-chain transactions without intermediaries.
- Toni Wahrstätter published a post highlighting the decline in median block rewards from a few hundred dollars in 2024, to a few tens of dollars today.
Talks & Discussions
- Recordings from Columbia CryptoEconomics (CCE) Workshop 2025 hosted by Columbia-Ethereum Research Center on Blockchain Protocol Design, and Briger Family Digital Finance Lab at Columbia Business School has been uploaded:
- Day 1:
- Ethereum Validator Economics in the Age of Real Time Proving by Kshitij Kulkarni
- Adversarial procurement for prover market design by Mike Neuder
- On the Welfare of EIP-1559 with Patient Bidders by Noam Nisan
- Minimmit: Fast Finality with Even Faster Blocks by Andy Lewis-Pye
- The “Micro” implications of PBS: evidence from non-winning Ethereum blocks by Andrea Canidio
- TimeBoost: Do Ahead-of-Time Auctions Work? by Akaki Mamageishvili
- Perils of Parallelism: Transaction Fee Mechanisms under Execution Uncertainty by Sarisht Wadhwa
- Censorship-resistant sealed-bid auctions on blockchains by Orestis Alpos
- Resource Constraints by Kyriaki Zioga
- The Evolution of Onchain Derivatives by Cole Kennelly
- Optimistic MEV in Ethereum Layer 2s: Why Blockspace Is Always in Demand by Lioba Heimbach
- The Darkest Part of the MEV Dark Forest by Mallesh Pai
- Day 2:
- EIP-1559: A Five-Year Retrospective by Tim Roughgarden
- Economic Censorship Games in Fraud Proofs by Ben Berger
- EVM Gas Metering - How to Manage Resources on Ethereum by Maria InĂŞs Silva
- Consensus Under Adversary Majority by Srivatsan Sridhar
- Bribers, Bribers on The Chain, Is Resisting All in Vain? by Kamilla Kara
- TEE^BFT : Pricing the Security of Proof of Cloud by Alexander Shamis
- Bitcoin & Quantum Computing by Clara Shikhelman
- The Implied Impermanent Loss in Decentralized Liquidity Provision by Thomas Li
- LifeXP+ - Usable, secure and available key recovery for blockchain applications by Panagiotis Chatzigiannis
- Panel: Tokenisation with Austin Campbell, Mallesh Pai, Joshua Rudolf and David Hoffman
- Day 3:
- Day 1:
- All Core Devs - Consensus (ACDC) #172 hosted by Alex Stokes discussed the recent BPO2 upgrade on mainnet, Glamsterdam testing, and the EIP headliners process for Heze.
- All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #65 hosted by Mario Vega covered preparations for BPO3, devnets for BALs and ePBS, gas limit increases, and more.
- Agenda by Mario Vega
- Thread by Pooja Ranjan
- FOCIL Breakout #26 hosted by Jihoon Song covered FOCIL testing and implementation updates.
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