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
- Preparing for the Dencun Hard Fork by Sarah Liu details Flashbots’ engineering work ahead of the Dencun upgrade.
- Ethereum has blobs. Where do we go from here? by Vitalik Buterin discusses the Dencun upgrade and outlines future direction to improve the scalability of Ethereum.
- Blob Propagation Issues Mar 27-28th by Benjamin Hunter provides context of the bug in bloXroute’s BDN network that caused proposers to miss multiple slots.
- Post by Uri Klarman
- Post by Michael Sproul
- RIG Update #5 — Huddle and ship by Robust Incentives Group provides an update on their recent publications on issuance curves, rainbow staking, inclusion lists, and more.
- Reward curve with tempered issuance: EIP research post by Anders Elowsson provides rationale for adjusting Ethereum’s issuance curve, covering both trade-offs and security considerations.
- Issuance Issues — Initial Issue by Mike Neuder discusses the evolving landscape of staking dynamics and the implications of adjusting the issuance curve in the Electra upgrade.
- Supporting decentralized staking through more anti-correlation incentives by Vitalik Buterin explores ways to penalize validators more severely for correlated misbehaviors to discourage consolidation of validators.
- Inactivity leak under MaxEB (EIP-7251) by dapplion explores how the Beacon Chain maintains network finality in the event of significant validator inactivity, and the implications of EIP-7251.
- The Road to Account Abstraction on Ethereum by Christine Kim outlines the progression and challenges of implementing account abstraction, with a focus on ERC-4337 and its adoption.
- The problem of 7547 and 3074 by Potuz discusses some of the incompatibilities between the current EIPs for account abstraction and inclusion lists.
- [RFC] [DRAFT] Anoma as the universal intent machine for Ethereum by Christopher Goes describes how Anoma can provide a universal intent machine where intents can be ordered, solved, and settled anywhere in the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Blob Preconfirmations with Inclusion Lists to Mitigate Blob Contention and Censorship by Christian Matt, Murat, Kartik Chopra, Evan Kim, and Bernardo Magri presents an out-of-protocol mechanism for blob inclusion to mitigate blob contention and censorship.
- EthGlobal2024 | Mitigating LVR with UNIV4 hook and a Vickrey auction on SUAVE by Miha Lotric, Konrad Strachan, and Orest Tarasiuk describes a way to redistribute LVR to LPs through a Vickrey auction mechanism using Uniswap v4 hooks and SUAVE.
- Compensating Mispricing Risk by Jonah B, ballsyalchemist, and Dex Chen outlines a design to auction off the right to arbitrage AMMs and redistribute the value to the initial LPs.
- Understanding MEV & OEV With SEDA & UMA by SEDA discusses the significance of OEV and how SEDA and UMA are designed to redistribute this value.
Posts & Threads
- Robert Miller published a post to highlight the complicated intersections of MEV and the need for thorough testing in light of the recent bug in bloXroute’s BDN service.
- Christine Kim published a thread that argues for reducing the reliance on closed-source software to ensure network health and stability as a response to the bloXroute BDN bug.
- Potuz published a thread that reflects on the recent bug in bloXroute’s BDN service and advocates for adopting ePBS as a way to address these issues.
- NodeKit published a thread to announce Javelin as a super builder enabling atomic execution and synchronous composability across rollups.
- Alex Watts published a thread introducing Balance Abstraction designed to enable seamless cross-chain asset management by pooling assets and leveraging execution abstraction via Atlas.
- Data Always published a thread to highlight the onboarding of a large number of validators to Titan’s relay, and reaching a 84% share of exclusive block flow.
Talks & Discussions
- Recordings from mev.market hosted by Flashbots and Nethermind have been uploaded:
- Everything is MEV (slides) by Nathan Worsley
- A History of MEV Discourse (slides) by Apriori
- From Talking about MEV to Building the Markets for the Next Millennia (slides) by Tomasz K. Stańczak
- The Endgame: 3 Years Later (slides) by Vitalik Buterin
- Panel | Big & Small Node: Balancing Performance and Decentralization moderated by Quintus Kilbourn, with Mustafa Al-Bassam, Joe Andrews, Josh Bowen, Vitalik Buterin, Lev Livnev and Ye Zhang
- United Chains of Ethereum (slides) by Justin Drake
- Execution Tickets and MEV Distribution in Based Sequencing (slides) by Ellie Davidson
- L2 Proposer and Builder Election Mechanisms (slides) by Conor McMenamin
- Economics of Shared Sequencing and Separate Sequencing (slides) by Jan Christoph Schlegel
- The Great Sequencing Debate (slides) moderated by Ellie Davidson
- The CAKE Framework (slides) by Ankit Chiplunkar and Stephane Gosselin
- SUAVE: a Big Node Framework? (slides) by Dmarz
- Panel | Application Specific Sequencing moderated by Justin Drake, with Apriori, Robert Miller, Stephane Gosselin and Hart Lambur
- Recordings from Chain Abstraction Day hosted by Agoric, Frontier Research, and NEAR Foundation have been uploaded with talks and panels unpacking the chain abstraction thesis.
- Matcha 0G Lounge Interview by Matcha invites Danning Sui and Amir Bandeali to discuss DeFi, DEX design, market structures, and the future of MEV.
- The Rollup:
- The Business Logic Of RaaS & Shared Sequencers invites Josh Bowen to explore shared sequencing, the business logic of RaaS, and Astria.
- Where Espresso Fits In The Modular Thesis invites Ellie Davidson to discuss shared sequencing, the shill bidding problem, and Espresso.
- Ethereum Sequencing and Preconfirmations Call #4 hosted by Justin Drake includes an update on the based rollup ecosystem, and invites Brendan Farmer to talk about the Polygon Aggregation Layer and cross-rollup bundle safety.
- Notes from Drew Van der Werff and Sam Jernigan
- Notes from Profesor Utonio
- Scraping Bits: MEV Searcher Team Breaking Into Block Building invites Connor to discuss ways to identify profitable MEV strategies, ethical considerations, and their journey into block building.
- What is Execution Abstraction? by Alex Watts explores execution abstraction, the value it adds to users and applications, and Atlas.
- Execution Layer Meeting 184 hosted by Tim Beiko includes a discussion on the recent bug in bloXroute’s BDN service, a presentation by storm on Ethereum’s state & history growth, and more.
- BuidlGuidl “What’s Going on Onchain” invites Matt Cutler to discuss onchain metrics following the Dencun upgrade, and a walk through of Ethernow
Other
- Is it hard to give away money? by Leonardo Arias asks about the philosophical and practical aspects of giving away money.
- Weaving an open research journal by Leonardo Arias is the start of an open redistribution research journal to study MEV disequilibrium.
- CIP-Draft: MEV Blocker fees by Andrea Canidio propose a set of new policies and criteria for builders receiving order flow from MEV Blocker.
- Xatu by ethPandaOps has been open sourced and is now publicly available with detailed data on beacon chain events, mempool activity, and canonical chain events.
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