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.
See our Transparency Reports for deeper dives into updates related to Flashbots.
Papers & Articles
- DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs by James Austgen, Andrés Fábrega, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel, Mahimna Kelkar and Ari Juels introduce Voting-Bloc Entropy (VBE) to formalizes a broad notion of decentralization in DAO voting, and present the first practical realization of a Dark DAO.
- Sequencers and Maximal Extractable Value by David Cao, Sofia Wawrzyniak and Brandon Wang examines multiple designs of rollup sequencers with a focus on MEV and decentralization.
- Dr. changestuff or: how i learned to stop worrying and love mev-burn by Mike Neuder presents protocol benefits of MEV-Burn and clears up some common misconceptions.
- MEV burn: Incentivizing earlier bidding in “a simple design” by Anders Elowsson presents a design for MEV-Burn that incentivize earlier bidding by rewarding builders who submit the winning bid at the observation deadline.
- Minimum Viable Issuance by Anders Elowsson delves into Ethereum’s staking economics and the balance between user utility, network security, and economic sustainability.
- The Costs of Censorship: A Modeling and Simulation Approach to Inclusion Lists by Thomas Thiery provides a framework to evaluate the impact of network conditions and inclusion list designs on various censorship resistance metrics.
- Based preconfirmations by Justin Drake show how based rollups (and based validiums) can offer users preconfirmations on transaction execution.
- Validator Smoothing Commitments by Jason Vranek propose Smoothing Commitments to improve permissionless liquid staking protocols by requiring node operators to pay upfront to run a validator.
- The Impact of Uniswap X on the DEX Ecosystem by Orange Finance explores the impact Uniswap v4 and Uniswap X could have on the DEX landscape.
- A sneak-peek at validator side MEV optimization by Chorus One shares the results of a recent pilot aimed to minimize the occurrence of missed slots, and increasing validator rewards.
- RIP MEV Bot 2 by rekt details the loss of $2 million by a searcher bot due to an unprotected swap function in its code.
Posts & threads
- Demystifying remote attestation by taking it on-chain by Andrew Miller demonstrates how to verify SGX remote attestations using Solidity smart contracts with RAVE from Puffer Finance.
- Blockchain Monitoring is MEV. Always was by Odysseas looks at the monitoring, detection and mitigation of onchain exploits and how incident response is coupled with MEV activity.
Talks & Discussions
- Bell Curve: A Deep Dive into Batch Auctions invites Anna George and Ludwig to discuss how batch auctions and CoW hooks mitigate MEV, and how the Angstrom project by Sorella Labs’ tackles LVR.
- Deciphering Private Orderflow in MEV w/ Blocknative and Fastlane Labs hosted by Fenbushi Capital invites Alex Watts and Blair Marshall to explore private order flow markets and the operations of FastLane on Polygon and Blocknative.
- Do You Need to Protect Yourself from MEV? hosted by DODO invites Matt Cutler to give an overview of MEV, and how users can protect themselves through private transactions.
Other
- libMEV by Cryptic Woods is a dashboard and bundle explorer with data on searchers and bundles since the Merge.
- Toni Wahrstätter announced a maintained list of OFAC sanctioned ETH addresses for research purposes.
- Ulisse by Chainbound is an Ethereum network topology explorer visualizing the geographical distribution of nodes.
- Thread by Chainbound
- suave-playground by Miha Lotric is a guide for setting up a local environment to build and submit Goerli blocks to Flashbots relay using SUAVE.
Upcoming events 
- Nov 15: ETHconomics by Robust Incentives Group will highlight economic problems on Ethereum with a focus on transaction fee mechanisms, staking economics and AMM mechanism design.
- Nov 16-17: Programmable Cryptography Conference by 0xPARC and PSE is a two day event focused on next-generation cryptography, applied cryptography, zkSNARKs and MPC.
- Nov 17: UNISUAVE Researchathon by Flashbots and Uniswap Foundation will explore what SUAVE and Uniswap v4 hooks can uniquely enable.
- Nov 18: censorship.wtf by T&T will explore censorship resistance across the entire Ethereum stack with speakers presenting from both Istanbul and Prague.
- Public Flashbots collective calendar have extensive information on all talks, panels and workshops by Flashbots during Devconnect, and beyond.
Sign up here if you’d like to get The MEV Letter straight to your inbox!
Previous editions of The MEV Letter
Join Flashbots 
