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
- Mitigating MEV with FHE - Blind Arbitrage on Ethereum by @jonathan presents a design that allows searchers to perform blind backruns using FHE.
- PROF: Protected Order Flow in a Profit-Seeking World by Kushal Babel, Nerla Jean-Louis, Yan Ji, Ujval Misra, Mahimna Kelkar, Kosala Yapa Mudiyanselage, Andrew Miller, and Ari Juels introduces a system to limit harmful forms of MEV by enforcing transaction ordering in existing PBS systems.
- The Espresso Sequencing Network: HotShot Consensus, Tiramisu Data-Availability, and Builder-Exchange by Jeb Bearer, Benedikt BĂĽnz, Philippe Camacho, Binyi Chen, Ellie Davidson, Ben Fisch, Brendon Fish, Gus Gutoski, Fernando Krell, Chengyu Lin, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Keyao Shen, Alex Xiong and Nathan Yospe present the Espresso Sequencing Network for L2s, including the HotShot Consensus , Tiramisu DA, and the Builder-Exchange mechanism.
- ShardDAG: Ordering and Exploitation in Sharded Blockchains by James Henderson details an architecture that addresses MEV challenges and censorship in state-sharded blockchains by enforcing a verifiable order for cross-shard transactions.
- The Crypto Dark Pool Design Playbook by @yusufxzy explores various designs for dark pools and private DeFi infrastructure, covering pre-execution privacy, order matching, liquidity sourcing, and compliance.
- The Future of DeFi: Overcoming 3 Key Blockers for Mass Adoption—Insights from the SBC Conference by Krzysztof Gogol discusses challenges that hinder the mass adoption of DeFi and how recent advancements presented at SBC’24 seek to address these issues.
- Bid cancellation in ePBS by Potuz details how bid cancellations currently work in MEV-Boost, and why they are irrelevant under ePBS.
- Proof of Service Integrity (PoSI): Trustless measurement of service integrity by peshwar9 presents a byzantine fault tolerant verification protocol for offchain activities, like block building.
- Aori, Game Theory, and DeFi by joshua describes the design of Aori and explores the future of DeFi and offchain infrastructure.
- Guess Which Builder Took $8.2M From the Table During Black Monday? by EigenPhi details how beaverbuild managed to earn 3.9K ETH during the market turmoil between Aug 3rd to Aug 5th.
Posts & Threads
- Terence Tsao published a post to outline some of the differences between FOCIL and BRAID, noting BRAID’s benefit of not requiring a committee, but having a higher implementation complexity.
- Barnabé Monnot published a thread commenting on the difference between FOCIL and BRAID, highlighting the flexibility of FOCIL, and the leaderless block construction in BRAID.
- Reply by Potuz
- Reply by Dan Robinson
- Alex Watts published a thread that examines how searchers might be impacted by MCP, and potential attacks by malicious proposers.
- Frankie published a thread expressing concerns of MCP related to potential timing games between proposers, and implementation complexities.
- @bert published a post to highlight a user receiving 7.7 ETH in MEV refund via Flashbot Protect.
- Entropy Advisors published a thread describing how faster block times on Arbitrum result in lower LVR for Uniswap LPs compared to Optimism.
- Entropy Advisors published a post of the new ATH in MEV revenue sent to proposers via MEV-Boost on Aug 5th.
Talks & Discussions
- Recordings from MEV-SBC’24 hosted by Flashbots have been uploaded with talks that highlight MEV research from the past year, as well as new areas of research:
- Oblivious RAM From Theory to Large Scale Adoption by Elaine Shi
- Privacy in DeFi Modularity, Grading, and Optimization by Tarun Chitra
- Programmable Privacy for MEV by @jonathan
- More Slides on Proposer Builder Separation by Mike Neuder
- Centralization in Attester Proposer Separation by Mallesh Pai
- Sailfish Towards Improving the Latency of DAG based BFT by Kartik Nayak
- Cross Rollup MEV Non Atomic Arbitrage Across Layer 2 Blockchains by Krzysztof Gogol
- Who Wins Ethereum Block Building Auctions and Why? by @sui414 and Burak Ă–z
- Panel: The Incentives of Short Term Censorship Resistance with Max Resnick and @phil, moderated by @Quintus
- MEV BooTEE: A TEE Approach to Partial Block Building by Oana Barbu
- Off-Chain Coordination via Liquefaction by James Austgen
- Using TEEs Without Trusting Them by Fan Zhang
- Agenda by @sarah.allen
- Recordings from Sequencing x CAKE day hosted by OneBalance and Espresso Systems are available with talks related to sequencing, preconfirmations, commitments, and chain abstraction.
- Thread by OneBalance
- Thread by The Rollup
- Livestream recordings of The Science of Blockchain Conference 2024 (SBC’24) by IC3, Stanford Center for Blockchain Research, and UC Berkeley RDI are available with talks on distributed systems, secure computing, crypto-economics, and more.
- Recordings of Blockchain Applications Stanford Summit (BASS) by Stanford Blockchain Club, Stanford Blockchain Accelerator and Crypto & Blockchain Alumni of Stanford are available with talks on the application, engineering and entrepreneurship aspects of blockchain innovation.
- Panel: Decentralized AI Agents with Xyn Sun, Ron Bodkin, Sishir Varghese, Amlandeep Bhadra, David Minarsch, and moderated by Matt Stephenson at Summit on Responsible Decentralized Intelligence hosted by Berkeley RDI discuss the interactions between AI agents and blockchains.
- WTF is TEE? hosted by zoé mc invites Andrew Miller, Alex Zaidelson, Roshan, Hang, Will Wendt for an introduction to TEEs in a new series of events dedicated to the topic.
- The Gwart Show: Where Uri Solves MEV invites Uri Klarman to discuss MEV, block building, MCP, and Paladin.
- Infinite Jungle: ACDC #139: The Role of ACD Call Chairs in Ethereum Governance by Christine Kim summarizes ACDC #139 which included discussions of Pectra, PeerDAS, and more.
Other
- Trustless TEE update. August 24 by @Quintus presents the latest developments and challenges in designing a secure open-source TEE, as detailed in Project T-TEE.
- SUAVE Office Hours by @cryptrowanderer announces a new series of calls launching on Aug 14th to discuss SUAPPs and how to build on SUAVE.
- Flashwares vi: it’s Lit by @mateusz details a new Flashwares livestream on Aug 14th with Harry Bairstow to discuss Lit Protocol’s approach to TEEs and threshold encryption.
- MEV-Boost community call #10 - 14 Aug 2024 by @ralexstokes invites the MEV-Boost community to discuss mev-boost v1.8, TEE-Boost, EIP-7732, and more.
Upcoming events
- Aug 14: Flashwares vi: it’s Lit by Harry Bairstow and @mateusz
- Aug 14: SUAVE Office Hours by @dmarz and @cryptrowanderer
- Aug 14: MEV-Boost community call #10 by @ralexstokes
- Aug 16-17: Frontiers by Paradigm
- Aug 20-27: MEV TOKYO by Titania Research
- Sept 19: TEE Unconference by Automata Network
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