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
- Non-Atomic Arbitrage in Decentralized Finance by Lioba Heimbach, Vabuk Pahari, Eric Schertenleib analyze CEX/DEX arbitrage and reveal that over 25% of DEX volume can be attributed to a small set of searchers performing non-atomic arbitrage.
- Playing the MEV Game on a First-Come-First-Served Blockchain by Burak Öz, Jonas Gebele, Parshant Singh, Filip Rezabek, Florian Matthes expands on their previous paper that studied MEV strategies on FCFS-sequenced blockchains by introducing an arbitrage detection algorithm and potential network layer optimizations.
- Illuminating Ethereum’s Order Flow Landscape by Angela Lu cast light on the evolving state of DeFi order and transaction flow, and discusses the challenges of building systems that remain decentralized while maximally benefiting the user.
- Dashboard by Angela Lu, Danning Sui and Jaden Durnford
- Thread by Angela Lu
- SUAVE CHANGELOG - Simple Updates About Virtually Everything by Andy provides details on new developments related to SUAVE from the last two weeks, including updates to suave-geth, suave-std, and suapp-examples.
- Debunking TEE FUD: A Brief Defense of The Use of TEEs in Crypto by Quintus Kilbourn and Andrew Miller addresses common misconceptions about TEEs and their intended use.
- Flashbots Protect Website by Shea Ketsdever announces a new website for connecting and configuring Flashbots Protect in order to get protected from frontrunning and earn refunds.
- Deciphering L2 MEV: Sequencer Workflow & MEV Data Analysis by DODO Research and hildobby explores various approaches to L2 sequencing and their impact on MEV.
- Trading in the Dark: Measuring Reordering Slippage in MEV by Evan Kim and Murat Akdeniz examines costs and bidding behaviors related to reordering slippage on Uniswap v2 & v3.
- Swimming Safely In The Public Mempool: MEV Smart Contract Obfuscation Techniques by DeGatchi presents techniques for obfuscating smart contracts in order to avoid frontrunning in public mempools.
- Essential Tools for Ethereum Block Builders by Cryptic Woods describes the positive impact bloXroute’s BDN service has had on penguinbuild due to access to additional transactions.
- Based Rollups can reward Proposers First Come First Serve by mteam argues for why based rollups should use FCFS sequencing despite concerns about spam and MEV.
- DAOs Must Confront Dark DAOs — Or Fall Under Their Shadow by James Austgen, Andrés Fábrega, Sarah Allen, Kushal Babel, Mahimna Kelkar, and Ari Juels provides an overview of Dark DAOs and introduces a demo that showcases vote-buying through a private smart contract.
- CIP draft: Increasing liquidity for COW token via a programmatic order and an FM-AMM by Andrea Canidio proposes that the CoW DAO allocate liquidity, using a programmatic order, to a Function Maximizing AMM (FM-AMM) designed to eliminate LVR and sandwich attacks.
Posts & Threads
- Antero Eloranta published a thread that presents results and open questions from the recently completed FRP-35: Pair Trading Opportunities as a form of MEV that researched pair trading on DEXes.
- FastLane Labs published a thread that provides a technical overview of SUAVE, the MEVM, and its potential impact on the Ethereum ecosystem.
- DODO published a thread that explores the prevalence of MEV on DEXes in the forms of sandwich attacks, arbitrage, and liquidations with data from EigenPhi.
- tldresear.ch published a thread to announce Feb 16 as the submission deadline for papers to be considered for the upcoming TLDR Conference in May.
- Titan Builder published a post to report that their domain had been suspended and DNS resolutions for RPC requests would start failing; the issue has since been resolved.
- Chorus One published a post to announce that a portion of their proposers have started to use a custom MEV-Boost client based on their previous research to increase rewards.
- Clayton Roche published a thread that details educational resources related to the current MEV landscape.
Talks & Discussions
- Scraping Bits:
- Reopening The Mempool: Disrupting Monopolized Private MEV Orderflow invites Alex Watts to discuss FastLane Labs, private orderflow, democratizing MEV, and how FastLane Atlas will leverage SUAVE.
- How A Trio Achieved A 87% Winrate Against Bloxroute’s Mempool Aggregation invites mempirate to discuss Chainbound, providing services in the MEV supply chain, network optimizations, mempools, and more.
- How Blocksec Intercepted $15M Of Web3 Exploits In Real Time invites Yajin (Andy) Zhou to discuss how Blocksec intercepts and prevents web3 exploits in real-time.
- MEV Crash Course | Maximal Extractable Value | PBS | Master MEV Bot | Searcher, Builder & Proposer by Uttam Singh provides an overview of MEV, PBS, MEV-Boost, and invites 0xprincess for a conversation on arbitrage.
Other
- builder-specs v0.4.0 Sophon by Ethereum Foundation has been released with changes required for Deneb, and support for spec testing.
Upcoming events
- Jan 26: FRP Unconference hosted by Flashbots will be a virtual unconference to celebrate the success of Flashbots Research Proposals (FRPs) with a selection of lightning talks and a town hall, hosted in Gather Town.
- Mar 3-10: Makers & Breakers {In The Rockies} hosted by FastLane Labs is a hackathon and dev-gathering in Aspen that will bring together mechanism designers, smart contract engineers, protocol developers, searchers and solvers.
- Post by Alex Watts
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