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
- State of Wallets 2024 by @tesa illuminates the current state of wallets on Ethereum, detailing trends in order flow dynamics, account abstraction, and more.
- No Fish Is Too Big for Flash Boys! Frontrunning on DAG-based Blockchains by Jianting Zhang and Aniket Kate details three novel frontrunning attacks in DAG-based blockchains, and potential countermeasures.
- Post by Aniket Kate
- Research Directions for Verifiable Crypto-Physically Secure TEEs draft by Sylvain Bellemare explores methods to secure TEEs from physical attacks and reduce trust in chip manufacturers and cloud providers.
- Honest MEV: a Theoretical Perspective by Togzhan Barakbayeva, Soroush Farokhnia, Amir Goharshady, and Sergei Novozhilov discuss ways to optimize block building, showing success on Bitcoin and Cardano but facing challenges with Ethereum’s transaction model.
- Aestus Timing Games as a Service by Aestus Relay describes the Aestus Relay’s approach to MEV-Boost timing games as a service, designed to close the gap between sophisticated and unsophisticated node operators.
- Debunking Common Misconceptions About Timeboost by Ed Felten aims to clarify misconceptions about Timeboost’s effects on MEV and transaction ordering in the Arbitrum ecosystem.
- LVR VS IL: the end-game for AMM design is the marriage between retail investors and liquidity providers by Andrea Canidio describes how CoW AMM allows LPs to earn trading fees, minimizes portfolio volatility, and avoid impermanent loss.
- Proposer-Commitment Infrastructure in Ethereum by Simon Brown explores emerging out-of-protocol solutions for proposer commitments like inclusion lists, preconfirmations, and blockspace futures.
- My Journey Scaling Ethereum: Introduction to My Work with the PBS Foundation by Chris Spannos describes their research on optimizing PBS for L2s in order to address challenges related to MEV and decentralization.
- On solo staking, local block building and blobs by Toni Wahrstätter discuss the trade-offs related to increasing blob throughput and whether it should be pursued for Pectra.
- Inclusion list and out of protocol market risks by Terence Tsao explores the challenges of inclusion list designs and the risks of out-of-protocol markets undermining transaction priority fees and not getting adoption.
- Transaction invalidation complexity in FOCIL by Terence Tsao documents transaction invalidation scenarios in FOCIL and raises questions on how they could impact block producers or verifiers.
- Three Transactions, Making Two Unique Types of Sandwiches by Upgraded Jaredfromsubway.eth by EigenPhi describes the techniques used by Jaredfromsubway.eth to successfully execute Swap-JIT-, and Split-Front-Run sandwich attacks.
- Why We Need to Fix DeFi: Addressing the CVMM Problem by Arrakis Finance highlights how MEV and intent-driven order flows are harming retail LPs, and how HOT AMM aims to protect LPs.
- Thread by Arrakis Finance
- Thread by Hilmar
- The Hybrid Order Type Automated Market Maker (HOT-AMM) by Valantis Labs details how Private Market Makers are outcompeting AMMs by attracting more profitable order flow, and how HOT AMM is designed to mitigate LVR and protect LPs.
Posts & Threads
- Azuki published a thread announcing a collaboration with Flashbots to demonstrate how TEEs can enable novel interactive onchain experiences, and an upcoming live Magic show on October 10th.
- @shea published a thread exploring why a 38 ETH transaction was only included by a Flashbots builder, despite being visible in the mempool by other builders.
- @stephen published a series of threads unraveling various searcher strategies via the EigenPhi explorer.
- MevRefund published a thread to highlight how the searcher 0x991 frontran a seemingly private shezmu hack for 250 ETH, and a private Mev Blocker transaction for another 249 ETH.
- Sylvain Bellemare published a post exploring whether TEEs can be compared to ZKP, FHE, or MPC and discusses the challenges of creating verifiable, crypto-physically secure TEEs.
Talks & Discussions
- Recordings from Epoch Singapore and Epoch Seoul hosted by moa and a41 have been uploaded with talks and panels on MEV, PBS, DEX design, and more.
- Enter the Dark Pool by @Tomasz
- Redefining Transaction Speed with @tesa, Harry Gao, and Kevin Lepsoe
- Future of Block Building with @tesa and Max Resnick
- BRAID: Implementing Multiple Concurrent Proposers in Ethereum by Max Resnick
- How App-Specific Sequencing enables Fat-App Thesis by Yuki Yuminaga
- Gas Markets: A New Era for Validators by Kevin Lepsoe
- Preconf from the Lens of Block Space Futures by Harry Gao
- Flashwares VIII: Dstack meets on-chain PCCS and ZK SNARK proofs of attestations invites @socrates1024 to present Dstack: speedrunning a p2p Confidential VM, and Deli Gong and Chua Zheng Leong to present DCAP library v4, On Chain PCCS and DCAP Rust Library.
- Indexer Podcast: The MEV Secrets You Don’t Know w/ Brontes [PBS Series EP3] invites Joseph Noorchashm and Ludwig to discuss MEV, DEX design, and Brontes.
- Unaligned Day 2024: The High Gwei to Hell by Max Resnick outlines the shortcomings of EIP-1559, and research on Dynamic Transaction Fee Mechanism Design.
- The Rollup: App-Specific Sequencing (ASS) & LVR Technical Debate invites Yuki Yuminaga and Alex Nezbolin to discuss LVR, MEV, and Application-Specific Sequencing.
- Post by The Rollup
- The Rollup: Are Based Rollups Really Based? invites BREAD, Cecilia Zhang, Sam Battenally, and mteam for a conversation on the current state of based rollups, their benefits, and how things might evolve from here.
- Intents and Cross-Chain Interoperability with apriori, Hart Lambur, Sergey Gorbunov, Arjun Bhuptani, 0xkaiserkarel, Arjun Chand, and Christopher Goes discuss the intent landscape and cross-chain Interoperability.
Other
- Contribute to Xatu: Join the Community Data Collection Effort by ethPandaOps details how Ethereum home stakers can contribute data to the Xatu dataset securely and anonymously.
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