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.
— Last week was packed with new content which results in this edition being longer than usual. To keep things neat and tidy, separate summaries will not be included for each relevant presentation at ZuBerlin, Preconf.wtf and DappCon24. These events are instead listed below with a single link for the reader to explore further.
Papers & Articles
- SPEC-06: Optimizing Exit Queues for Proof-of-Stake Blockchains: A Mechanism Design Approach by Mike Neuder, Mallesh Pai and Max Resnick studies exit mechanisms in PoS protocols and introduces the MINSLACK mechanism where the exit rate depends on the number of previous exits and a set of constraints imposed by the protocol.
- Thread by Mike Neuder
- Thread by Mallesh Pai
- Thread by Max Resnick
- Preconfirmations: Credible Promise of Future Execution by Raghav Agarwal analyzes proposed designs for preconfirmations and their implications on decentralization, MEV and censorship resistance.
- Commitment Games and Where to Find Them by Murat Akdeniz describes the design considerations for commitment games such as preconfirmations, multi-block MEV, and more.
- Preconfirmations: On splitting the block, mev-boost compatibility and relays by Daniele Palombi introduces eXtensible Gas Auctions and provides an overview of XGA-styled preconfirmation mechanisms.
- Solutions to the Preconf Fair Exchange Problem by Elim Poon proposes an alternative approach to the preconfirmation fair exchange problem in leader-based preconfirmation setups.
- A simple, small, mev-boost compatible preconfirmation idea by Fabrizio Romano Genovese explores a way to extend MEV-Boost to incorporate preconfirmations with minimal changes, and backward compatibility.
- One-bit-per-attester inclusion lists by Vitalik Buterin describes a way to decentralize the authority of inclusion lists from the proposer to a group of attesters with semi-deniability.
- Presentation (18:45) by Vitalik Buterin at ZuBerlin
- How SUAVE Can Address Builder Centralization by 100y.eth presents issues related to builder centralization and how solutions like SUAVE might mitigate these problems.
- The Unseen Bidding War That is Happening Every Second by EigenPhi looks at dynamics in the builder market and the strategies used by the leading builders to win blocks.
- Fueling the Win: Analyzing Builders’ Gas Bidding Strategy by EigenPhi analyzes gas usage patterns and bidding strategies used by Titan.
- The Unseen Bidding War: Beaver’s Craft vs. Titan’s Strength by EigenPhi analyzes gas usage patterns and bidding strategies used by Beaverbuild.
- Blobs, Reorgs, and the Role of MEV-Boost by Toni Wahrstätter explores how MEV-Boost affects the probability of reorgs and blob inclusion rates.
- Slot Inclusion Rates and Blob Market Combinatorics by Evan Kim provides insights into the blob market by analyzing reorg risk, submission strategies, and potential censorship.
- Blob Adoption and Utilization - Insights from the first 85 days by Victoria Tran present data related to the impact of blobs on gas prices and the scalability of L2s.
- Burn incentives in MEV pricing auctions by Anders Elowsson reviews proposed mechanisms for burning MEV and highlights how incentives to drive up the price floor can emerge regardless of any direct profit motive among builders for doing so.
- The Franchised Sequencer by Tom Walton-Pocock presents a method to make dapps more lightweight by only storing a fingerprint of their state on Ethereum and instead post validity proofs.
- EIP for EVM Native Bundles by Lily outlines an EIP that gives transactions and smart contracts more control over how they are sequenced through explicit delegation of local sequencing rights.
- Forced txs vs based sequencing by donnoh explores the differences between forced transaction mechanisms and based sequencing.
- 5 post capitalist experiments to be better infomed for MEV redistribution by @guayabyte
discusses cyclical failures to change underlying thought patterns and proposes experiments to address issues in Ethereum.
Posts & Threads
- Robert Miller published a post to highlight that Flashbots Whitehats saved approximately $1.5M in ZKsync tokens from users with hacked private keys.
- Data Always published a post to highlight that the cumulative MEV-Boost payouts have exceeded $1B.
- Alex Nezlobin published a post to describe the problem of finding a price for arbitrage preconfirmations, arguing that it cannot satisfy both arbitrageurs and validators due to conflicting profit expectations.
- Yuki Yuminaga published a thread to explore use cases that can be unlocked via preconfirmations beyond based sequencing.
- Ellie Davidson published a post that categorizes preconfirmations across a spectrum between inclusion to execution and highlights the differences in terms of UX, latency and MEV.
- NodeKit published a thread to demonstrate atomic composability across rollups using Javelin.
Talks & Discussions
- Recordings from the first week of ZuBerlin have been uploaded with talks and panels on topics related to sequencing, MEV, intents, ZK and more.
- Preconf.wtf curated by T.I.N.A. and Kubi Mensah
- Recordings from DappCon24 by GnosisDAO have been uploaded with talks related to L2s, application design, sequencing, MEV, and more.
- dAGI House by cyber•Fund and Epic Web3: Building Cooperative AI via Decentralized Commitment Devices by Xinyuan Sun discuss learnings from running high-frequency auctions for algorithmic agents with real economic incentives and hyper-adversarial behaviors.
- Flashwares iv: TEEception by @mateusz explores nested virtualization in TDX by running attestable containers in an attested TDX VM.
- CBER forum: Beyond the Ethereum Protocol: Proposer-Builder-Separation by Barnabé Monnot provides an overview of MEV-Boost and the execution duties of proposers.
- The Gwart Show: Concerning Trading On-Chain, And Other Bad Ideas invites Benedict Brady and Doug Colkitt to discuss DEX design, MEV, PBS, and more.
Other
- Relayscan.io Bid Archive by @metachris provides nightly data with all builder bids across all MEV-Boost relays.
- Forum post by @metachris
- Post by @metachris
- Video by @metachris
- PBS Snapshot by Data Always is a command-line program that delivers a simplistic snapshot of PBS on Ethereum.
- Commit-Boost by Gattaca, Limechain and EigenLayer is a proof of concept for a validator sidecar focused on standardizing the last mile of communication between validators and third parties.
- ZuBerlin - Preconfs Devnet presents the result of a multi-team effort at ZuBerlin to run a based preconfirmation devnet.
- Post by Justin Drake
- Thread by Chainbound
- Post by Chorus One
- Searchers of Nottingham by Dragonfly is a multiplayer, MEV-themed game, where players act as merchants at a medieval fair exchanging their gold and goods.
- MEV-Tax: A Solidity Library for MEV Taxes is a Solidity library that allows smart contracts to automatically charge MEX taxes based on the priority fees of transactions.
- Research Project: From Trusted to Trustless Execution Environments by @Quintus outlines an effort by Flashbots to realize a TEE which more thoroughly enables the decentralized ethos and goals of the crypto industry.
- T(EE)-Stack demo: running a validator in TDX by @fnerdman is a follow along tutorial for running a validator in TDX using the yocto minimal VM, as presented in the T-Stack demo by @fnerdman at ZuBerlin.
- Taxonomy of TEE Attacks by @Quintus is a wiki designed to collect information related to TEE vulnerabilities.
- Blockchain projects working with trusted execution environments by @guayabyte is a wiki on blockchain projects utilizing TEEs.
- ePBS FAQ #0 by Terence Tsao addresses questions and concerns related to ePBS.
- Intro to Whetstone by Whetstone Research introduces a mechanism design research firm with a focus on the future of onchain markets.
Upcoming events
- June 20: Light In The Dark Forest: How To Fight MEV by The Defiant with Phil Daian, Kushal Babel and Justin Drake
- Post by The Defiant
- Post by IC3
- EC’24 Preview Week by EC’24:
- June 26: MEV-Boost community call #9 by Alex Stokes
- July 7: Sequencing x CAKE day by Espresso and Frontier Research
- July 8-11: EthCC by Ethereum France
- July 8: Searcher.wtf by aori, Flood, Chainbound, PropellerHeads, bloXroute Labs and Barter
- July 9: L2con by Epic Web3
- July 10: FHE Summit by FHE Onchain
- July 11: Unaligned Day by FastLane Labs
- Thread by Alex Watts
- Thread by Alex Watts
- July 11-13: Modular Summit 3.0 by Celestia Labs and Maven11
- Aug 6: The MEV Workshop at the Science of Blockchain Conference 2024 (MEV SBC ’24) by Flashbots
- Aug 7-9: The Science of Blockchain Conference 2024 (SBC’24) by IC3, Stanford Center for Blockchain Research and UC Berkeley RDI.
- Aug 16-17: Frontiers by Paradigm
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