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.
Papers & Articles
- The Geography of (Concurrent) Block Proposing by Ciamac C. Moallemi, Mallesh M. Pai, Dan Robinson, and @Christoph models how multiple concurrent block proposers can encourage geographic decentralization as competing proposers benefit from locating near different information sources and receiving market information before their rivals.
- Empirical Analysis of TEE-Enabled Rollup Designs by Claudiu-Nicu Bărbieru, Corentin Libert, Peterson Yuhala, Andrei Arusoaie, Matthieu Bettinger, Oana-Otilia Captarencu, Pascal Felber, Emanuel Onica, Etienne Rivière, and Valerio Schiavoni benchmarks rollup designs using Flashbots’ Rollup-Boost, finding minimal inclusion-time overhead from TEEs, and roughly twice as fast inclusion with op-rbuilder versus op-geth.
- The Dark Forest Was a Testing Ground by Bettina Warburg draws on Flashbots’ research in MEV and adversarial markets to address central questions facing the emerging agent economy around verifiable actions, delegated authority, and Proof-of-Control.
- Loss-versus-rebalancing with external proportional transaction costs by Masaaki Fukasawa studies AMM liquidity provision, identifying zero-LVR conditions where LPs perform as well as rebalancing after trading costs.
- How Much Screening Buys a Second? Speed, Selection, and the Maker’s Spread by nuconstruct models the trade-off between speed and screening, finding that a twelve-second maker must reject roughly 85% of informed flow to match an unscreened one-second maker’s break-even spread.
- Active Liquidity On Chain: Evidence from PropAMMs Across Chains by Ozan Solmaz, Lioba Heimbach, and Jason Milionis summarizes findings from Active Liquidity On Chain: Evidence from PropAMMs Across Chains, which analyzes how propAMMs achieve better short-term markouts than AMMs, and evaluates the prices they offer retail users.
- Glamsterdam scaling results on Sepolia, ten days in by Terence Tsao reports a 134% higher average gas use per block since Glamsterdam activation on Sepolia, alongside faster median block arrival and lower overall median payload execution time.
- Post by Terence Tsao
- Ethereum Upgrades: Past, Future, and Coming soon by EthSystems examines how Glamsterdam and Hegotá affect institutional use of Ethereum, highlighting gas repricing, account controls, and remaining privacy limitations.
- Thread by EthSystems
Posts & Threads
- Francesco D’Amato published a thread presenting a formal verification of FCR, with a Lean safety proof showing that confirmed blocks remain canonical under its assumptions.
- Barnabé Monnot published a thread with takeaways from Cambridge PQ R&D Workshop Week, highlighting progress toward faster, post-quantum finality.
- Ethlabs published a thread sharing highlights from the Cambridge PQ R&D Workshop Week on Ethereum’s PQ roadmap, AI-assisted formal verification, fast finality, decoupled consensus, and more, attended by over 100 researchers from 69 organizations.
- Yann Vonlanthen published a post sharing a recap of the fast finality discussions during Cambridge PQ R&D Workshop Week, from AI-assisted formal verification and lean clients to PQ validators and one-round finality
- Derek Chiang published a post detailing why blob inclusion can be unreliable even when fees are low, and how ePBS is expected to help by giving blobs more propagation time.
- Reply by Data Always
- Toni Wahrstätter published a post explaining how BALs let returning nodes skip re-execution for finalized blocks, resulting in 115x faster catch-up in an early Nethermind benchmark.
- Barnabé Monnot published a thread calling for shared account standards and wallet support to make Frame Transactions practical for users and avoid repeating EIP-7702’s fragmentation.
- Derek Chiang published a post explaining how EIP-8288 would turn Ethereum’s mempool into a distributed proving network, combining signatures and proofs before a builder produces one final proof with lightweight verification for validators.
Talks & Discussions
- Credible Commitments: The Holy Grail of Block Building invites Michael Moser to discuss Multi-Party Block Construction (MPBC), including builder coordination, operator economics, blob inclusion, and its relationship with FOCIL.
- All Core Devs - Consensus (ACDC) #189, October 15, 2026 hosted by Alex Stokes covered Glamsterdam’s Sepolia results, client releases, Hoodi preparations, and Hegotá EIP scoping.
- Agenda by Alex Stokes
- Notes by Forkcast
- Notes by Yash Kamal Chaturvedi
- All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #101, October 19, 2026 hosted by danceratopz discussed preparations for Glamsterdam activation on Hoodi, and priorities for Hegotá testing.
- FOCIL Breakout #44, October 13, 2026 hosted by Jihoon Song covered FOCIL testing and implementation updates.
Other
- Glamsterdam Hoodi Testnet Announcement by Ethereum Foundation Protocol Cluster announces Glamsterdam’s October 26 activation on Hoodi, while mainnet timing remains undecided.
- Post by Alex Stokes
- ETH is Ethereum’s most important application. Ethlabs Week 17. by Joshua Rudolf presents Ethlabs’ recent work on AI-assisted verification, post-quantum security, faster finality, faster confirmations, and blob scaling.
- Take-aways from the Cambridge PQ R&D workshop week '26 by Ladislaus von Daniels shares takeaways from Cambridge PQ R&D Workshop Week on PQ migration, leanVM-based signature aggregation, formal verification, AI-assisted research, and more.
- Live Metrics by Blockspace Forum is a dashboard and tracing tool for Multi-Party Block Construction (MPBC) that details how operators handle submitted transactions and why some transactions are rejected.
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