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
- Update the System, Update the Market by @ryager describes how US capital markets are undergoing a structural shift driven by advances in technology and growing demand for 24/7 trading, fractional ownership, instant settlement, and stablecoin-based funding.
- Enshrined Proposer Builder Separation in the presence of Maximal Extractable Value by Yitian Wang, Yebo Feng, Yingjiu Li, and Jiahua Xu analyzes ePBS and finds that it incentivizes aggressive MEV strategies from builders and amplifies market centralization rather than reducing it.
- Second Thoughts: How 1-second subslots transform CEX-DEX Arbitrage on Ethereum by nuconstruct and AnteroE examines the impact of reducing Ethereum slot times on DEX activity, with a focus on CEX-DEX arbitrage behavior.
- Hegotá Headliner Proposal: FOCIL, EIP-7805 by Thomas Thiery presents the case for including FOCIL in Hegotá to improve censorship resistance and timely transaction inclusion.
- Post by Thomas Thiery
- Post by Julian Ma
- L1-zkEVM Roadmap 2026: Integrating zkEVM Proofs into Ethereum’s Core Protocol by the zkEVM team at Ethereum Foundation presents the L1‑zkEVM roadmap for 2026 and the milestones required to enable zkEVM proofs as a viable alternative to re-execution in the attesting workflow.
- Reducing BAL Size with 10 GigaGas/s EVM Throughput in the Presence of I/O by Po and Qi Zhou evaluates three designs for BALs: full BAL, batched I/O BAL, and parallel I/O BAL, with different trade-offs between execution throughput and BAL size.
- What If Smart Contracts Could Trade on ‘Binance’? Introducing a Smart Contract Callable Trading Infrastructure for DeFi on Any Chain by KD.Conway describes an onchain trading infrastructure that enables contracts to invoke CEX-level trading through a verifiable oracle gateway.
- I’ve Been Thinking About GeoTAG (And How to Keep It Private… Need Your Thoughts!) by @wisdom outlines three privacy-preserving approaches to enable validators to prove their regional presence without revealing precise location data.
- Multiple Concurrent Proposers (MCP): How to Remove Proposer Power Rather than Auctioning It by Umberto argues that single-leader proposer monopoly is an architectural risk, and presents MCP as a solution to reduce MEV extraction.
- Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS): What It Fixes, What It Shifts by Umberto explains how PBS emerged as a response to excessive proposer power, does not eliminate MEV or enforce fairness, but rather shifts transaction discretion to builders.
Posts & Threads
- Justin Drake published a post announcing the formation of a new Post Quantum (PQ) team at Ethereum Foundation, declaring PQ security a top strategic priority.
- sreevanth published a thread commenting on From Solana to the EVM: A New Path for Proprietary AMMs by Optimus, with input on how user behavior and economics have enabled prop-AMMs to be more popular on SVM than EVM.
- 721Orbit published a thread detailing the difference between the onchain and offchain paths block builders can submit blocks under ePBS.
Talks & Discussions
- CBER Forum: Optimal Rollup Design by Ciamac C. Moallemi presents a framework for transaction posting and fee pricing in L2s that dynamically responds to L1 gas fee fluctuations and network congestion, as described in A Framework for Combined Transaction Posting and Pricing for Layer 2 Blockchains by Shouqiao Wang, Davide Crapis and Ciamac C. Moallemi.
- CBER Forum: Base Blockchain by Anika Raghuvanshi gives an overview of Base and the progress to scale towards 1 Gigagas per second.
- All Core Devs - Consensus (ACDC) #173, Jan 22, 2026 hosted by Alex Stokes covered implementation progress on Glamsterdam EIPs, and discussed reducing the scope to deliver the upgrade by mid-year.
- All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #67, January 26, 2026 hosted by Mario Vega discussed devnets for BALs and ePBS, gas limit benchmarking, and more.
- Agenda by Mario Vega
- Notes by Pooja Ranjan
- EIP-7928 Breakout #11, Jan 28, 2026 hosted by Toni Wahrstätter covered updates from BALs devnets, specification updates, and client optimizations.
Other
- Builder Playground v0.3.0 by Flashbots introduces new integrations, faster startup times, improved observability, YAML-based custom recipes, and more.
- Thread by @metachris
- Geographical Decentralization Simulation by @syang, @boz1 Fei Wu, and Fan Zhang is an interface for simulating the geographical decentralization of Ethereum validators, with preprocessed datasets that visualize validator placement, latency, and performance.
- vixy by Chainbound is an Ethereum node proxy built in Rust that monitors node health and automatically routes traffic to healthy endpoints.
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