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
- Introducing BuilderNet by Flashbots presents BuilderNet, a decentralized block building network designed to neutralize exclusive orderflow deals, enhance Ethereum’s censorship resistance, and accelerate decentralization across rollups and apps.
- Forum post by Flashbots
- Thread by @shea
- Thread by @bert
- Thread by @Hasu
- Thread by Nethermind
- Introducing contender by @brock outlines the pre-alpha of Contender, a benchmarking tool for EL clients designed to simulate realistic, repeatable transaction scenarios to test node performance.
- Portait of a TEE: applications and identity by @mateusz examine methods for identifying TEE instances and applications, emphasizing the limitations of existing attestation-based methods and the potential role of smart contracts.
- Resonance: Transaction Fees for Heterogeneous Computation by Maryam Bahrani and Naveen Durvasula presents a transaction fee mechanism designed to efficiently address heterogeneous computational demands between users and nodes.
- The 5 Levels of Secure Hardware by Georgios Konstantopoulos defines five levels of secure hardware, where each level enables more use cases, better performance, and higher security.
- Analysing Expected Proposer Revenue from Preconfirmations by Conor McMenamin presents Dependent Sub-Slot Auctions (DSSAs), a preconfirmation protocol that increases proposer revenue even without preconfirmation tips.
- Dynamic Finalization Considering 51% Attacks by Titania Research identifies risks associated with PoS Ethereum, especially 51% attacks, and proposes new detection and delay mechanisms to improve network resilience.
- Transport privacy exploration of the Validator-Relayer Builder API by QYu demonstrates transport-level metadata leaks by MEV-Boost relays that can be exploited to de-anonymize validators and attack the network.
- Block Arrivals, Home Stakers & Bumping the blob count by Sam Calder-Mason analyzes how increasing Ethereum’s blob count via EIP-7691 would impact bandwidth-limited nodes and overall network performance.
- The case for EIP-7732 in Fusaka by Potuz outlines the rationale for adopting EIP-7732 in Fusaka by detailing its benefits for network latency, bandwidth, and stability.
- In-Protocol Transaction Ordering by Matthew Keil presents a refinement to FOCIL that addresses transaction selection, ordering, and rewards redistribution by incorporating deterministic ordering.
- Secret Sharing with Snitching: Addressing Shareholder Collusion in Threshold Cryptography by Shutter explores how Secret Sharing with Snitching enhances the security of threshold cryptography by deterring and detecting collusion through fraud proofs.
- Hoo Hoo! The First Mainnet Encrypted Mempool by EigenPhi examines the use of encrypted mempools, such as Shutter’s implementation on Gnosis Chain, as a way to mitigate MEV and improve censorship resistance.
- Preconfirmation (feat. Taiko): Make Ethereum Fast for the First Time! by Ingeun Kim details how Taiko and other rollups can use based preconfirmation to improve transaction finality and enhance interoperability.
- Introducing Plasma: A Reference Implementation of a Sandwich-Resistant AMM by Ellipsis Labs announces the release of a sandwich-resistant AMM reference implementation designed to mitigate sandwich attacks.
- Same Slot vs. Next Slot Inclusion List by Terence Tsao evaluates the tradeoffs between Same-Slot and Next-Slot inclusion lists in the context of EIP-7547 and EIP-7805.
- MEV isn’t as competitive as you think by mteam explores the competitive differences between short tail and long tail MEV.
Posts & Threads
- PBS Foundation published a thread to highlight content from Devcon SEA related to protocols, MEV, and auction design.
- Gideon published a series of posts diving into topics related to the intersection of TEEs and blockchains:
- 0xprincess published a thread announcing TOOL by NuConstruct that’s using TEEs to process orderflow privately and provide 1-second sub-slots with execution guarantees.
- CoW DAO published a thread detailing a multi-block MEV attack that exploited CoW Protocol’s OrderBook API, and steps being taken to mitigate the information leakage.
- libevm published a thread explaining how searchers exploit logs_bloom to execute blind sandwich attacks, bypassing protections such as MetaMask’s smart transaction feature.
- Doug Colkitt published a thread detailing how sniper bots are exploiting Clanker’s UniV3 NFT deployment on Base to preemptively snipe new pools causing excessive transaction spam, and suggests ways to resolve the issue.
- bolt published a thread announcing that bolt has been deployed on the Holešky testnet to enable permissionless proposer commitments.
- Jarrod Watts published a thread describing the current state of PBS and how EIP-7805 is designed to improve censorship resistance.
- Anders Elowsson published a thread to illustrate how an automated gradual reduction down to a new reward curve over a period of 1-2 years could look like.
- 0age published a thread detailing The Compact by Uniswap designed for reusable resource locks to address inefficiencies in cross-chain swaps.
- Titan Relay published a thread outlining new access requirements for the TopBid websocket stream in Titan Relay.
Talks & Discussions
- Additional recordings from Devcon SEA hosted by Ethereum Foundation have been uploaded:
- Conditional Recall by @Christoph and @sxysun
- Empirical analysis of AMM loss versus rebalancing on layer 2 chains by @elainehu
- Who Wins Ethereum Block Building Auctions and Why? by @boz1 and @sui414
- Fork-Choice enforced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) by Julian Ma
- The tension between MEV and Censorship Resistance Gadgets by Julian Ma
- Single Slot Finality and the future of staking by Francesco
- A DAG-Based Mechanism for Fairer and More Decentralized Reward Distribution by Barnabé Monnot
- L2 Specific MEV Mitigation Strategies by Joseph Poon
- Inclusion List Inevitable Tradeoffs by Terence Tsao
- Bootstrapping a block builder by Sean Anderson
- Can we fix MEV? by Jonah Burian
- Does Ethereum Really Need PBS? Solving MEV at the app vs the infrastructure layer by Felix Leupold
- Is multi-block MEV a thing? Insights from 2 years of MEV Boost Data by Pascal Stichler
- Next Generation AMMs - Eliminating LVR by Anna George
- Fair combinatorial auction for trade intents: how to design mechanisms without a numeraire by Andrea Canidio
- A Revenue Model for Based Rollups by Conor McMenamin
- The Chain Abstraction Master Plan by Stephane Gosselin
- Building a Cross-Chain DEX with Chain Abstraction & Intents by Shao
- Native Account Abstraction in Pectra, rollups and beyond: combining EOF, EIP-7702 and RIP-7560 by Alex Forshtat
- Uniday hosted by Uniswap Foundation, Unichain, and Flashbots:
- Uniswap Community Update by Devin Walsh
- Building Unichain by Mark Toda
- Designing for the Superchain by Chelsy Wu
- MEV Alignment: How Ethereum’s History with MEV Can Help Rollups Win by @shea
- The Future of Interoperability by Mark Tyneway
- Leading DeFi Through Collaboration, Innovation, and Access with Stani Kulechov and Devin Walsh
- Panel: Social Capital with Dylan Abruscato, Chase Chapman, and Iz
- Scaling Defi for Global Finance by Gordon Liao
- The Next Generation of DeFi Builders by Bhaumik Patel
- App Specific Sequencing by Ludwig Thouvenin and Yuki Yuminaga
- Transforming Financial Infrastructure into Public Goods by Paul Frambot
- Building with Circle on Unichain by Elton Tay
- Realizing the Rollup Centric Roadmap by dmarz
- Panel: What’s Beyond High-Performance Layer 2’s with Georgios Konstantopoulos, @bert , Mark Toda and Mark Tyneway
- Priority Is All You Need by Dan Robinson
- Panel: Where the Infinite Garden Grows with Vitalik Buterin, @phil, Karl Floersch, Ben Jones, Jing Wang, and @Tina
- Thread by Uniswap Foundation
- preconf.erence hosted by Primev, Nethermind, Taiko Gwyneth, and Puffer Finance:
- On the Economic Viability of Preconfirmations by Conor McMenamin
- Panel: Shared Sequencing and Synchronous Commitments with Brecht Devos, Noah Pravecek, Alysia, Dex Chen, AJ Park, Can Kisagun, and Christian Matt
- Panel: Solver POV with Markus Schmitt, Matt Deible, Connor, Nikita Ovchinnik, Nikita Ovchinnik, Vishwa Naik, and Wee Howe
- Panel: Preconf Flavors with mempirate, Kevin Lepsoe, Harry Gao, Murat Akdeniz, and Evan Kim
- Panel: Based Rollups with Irfan Shaik, Amir Forouzani, Kaito, Ahmad Mazen Bitar, and Justin Drake
- Thread by Primev
- EthScale @ Devcon hosted by Caladan and ETHGas:
- Preconfs and the Future of PBS with Artemiy Parshakov, kassandra.eth, Luca Georges Wee Howe, and Kevin Lepsoe
- Synchronous Composability in a Multi-Layer World with Cecilia Zhang, Sam Battenally, Ellie Davidson, and Jiawei Zhu
- An Insider’s Perspective on the Evolving MEV Landscape with Yuki Yuminaga, Alex Watts, Matt Cutler and John Park
- ETH Gas Markets Panel with Kevin Lepsoe, Juan David, Alain Kunz, Artemiy Parshakov, Laszlo Szabo, and Einar Braathen
- Thread by Caladan
- DataPalooza hosted by The Graph:
- Blockchain Oracle Summit hosted by Party Action People:
- Ethereum Interop Forum:
- Infinite Jungle: ePBS Office Hours invites Potuz and Terence Tsao to discuss ePBS and their efforts to prepare EIP-7732 for the Fusaka upgrade.
- EIP-7732 breakout room #13 hosted by Potuz discusses solutions for handling withdrawals after empty blocks in EIP-7732, and ways to mitigate the nothing-at-stake risks for staking pools.
Other
- United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit No. 23-50669 determines that U.S Department of Treasury’s sanctions against Tornado Cash immutable smart contracts are unlawful.
- Thread by Paul Grewal
- Thread by Bill Hughes
- Post-Mortem: High Missed Block Rate Incident on 28/11/2024 by Titan Relay details an incident on Nov 28th that caused a high rate of missed blocks due to invalid blocks being processed optimistically by their relay.
- speedrunning anoncast natively on X with TEEs by @sxysun livestreamed coding anoncast_ natively on Twitter with TEEs.
- Automata at Devcon 2024 by Automata highlights their participation in Devcon SEA focused on TEEs, secure hardware, and web3 integrations.
Sign up here if you’d like to get The MEV Letter straight to your inbox!