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
- Unichain Mainnet is Here — A New Home for DeFi by Uniswap Labs announces the launch of Unichain with lower fees, faster transactions, and built to be seamlessly interoperable and decentralized.
- Thread by Unichain
- Thread by Uniswap Labs
- Thread by Uniswap Foundation
- Post by Hayden Adams
- Optimal Routing in the Presence of Hooks: Three Case Studies by Tarun Chitra, Kshitij Kulkarni, and Karthik Srinivasan analyzes optimal trade execution over networks of CFMMs in the presence of Uniswap v4 hooks.
- The Road Towards an Encrypted Mempool On Ethereum by Frederik Lührs, Luis Bezzenberger, Francesco Mosterts, Sebastian Faust, and Andreas Erwig details the general goals, challenges, and end vision for transaction encryption, and outlines a practical roadmap for implementing a threshold encrypted mempool on Ethereum L1.
- Local block building and gas limit increases by @dataalways shares thoughts on the recent gas limit increase and its implications on reorg rates and solo stakers.
- Delayed Execution by Francesco describes approaches to attest to a block without executing its transactions by introducing upfront builder payments or optimistic attestation.
- Delayed Execution And Skipped Transactions by Toni Wahrstätter details how Delayed Execution decouples block validation from immediate transaction execution, and what it could mean for scaling.
- zkFOCIL: Inclusion List Privacy using Linkable Ring Signatures by George Kadianakis, Benedikt Wagner, and Thomas Thiery proposes an alternative approach to improving FOCIL privacy based on Linkable Ring Signatures (LRS) that allows validators to privately publish inclusion lists.
- Why Is Everyone in Ethereum Talking About TEEs? by Jason Chaskin explores how Flashbots and others are leveraging TEEs in rollup design and MEV infrastructure to enhance privacy, censorship resistance, and decentralization.
- Futures of Ethereum II: Improving Censorship Resistance by sm-stack discuss the current centralization in the builder market, and potential solutions like FOCIL, BRAID and BuilderNet to improve decentralization and censorship resistance.
- Thread by sm-stack
- Thread by 2077 Research
- Bringing Interoperability to Arbitrum and Ethereum by Offchain Labs outlines their vision for intent-driven interoperability across EVM-compatible networks.
- How To Fix Ethereum’s Fragmentation Problem by Hart Lambur outlines the challenges of L2 fragmentation and how ERC-7683 is designed to unify cross-chain intents.
- Post by Hart Lambur
- ULTRA TX - Programmable blocks: One transaction is all you need for a unified and extendable Ethereum by Brecht Devos introduces a mechanism to enable synchronous cross-chain interactions by bundling L1 and L2 transactions into a single, block-sized, L1 transaction.
- Optimistic rollups, the challenge period and strong censorship attacks by donnoh.eth examines the rationale behind the 7-day challenge period for optimistic rollups and the security implications of shorter periods.
- Post by donnoh.eth
- Understanding Censorship Resistance on Ethereum by Phil Ngo and Ben Adar discuss censorship resistance, why it matters, and ongoing efforts to keep Ethereum decentralized.
- Charting Ethereum’s Account Abstraction Roadmap II: EIP-7377 & EIP-5003 by Zhev and Emmanuel Awosika examines the design of EIP-5003, EIP-7377 and EIP-7702 that enables EOAs to mimic smart contract accounts.
- The Case for Programmatically accelerating Ethereum’s Network Capacity by Giulio Rebuffo argues that Ethereum should adopt a predefined schedule to gradually increase gas limit and blob count.
- Doppler is the Future of Onchain Markets by Austin Adams outlines the launch of Doppler as a liquidity bootstrapping protocol built on top of Uniswap v4, and Pure as its first front-end.
- Ethereum’s Next Frontier: Insights from Sequencing Day by Tariz shares takeaways from Sequencing Day at Devcon SEA related to scaling, MEV, censorship resistance and interoperability.
- TLDR: The Hardest Problems in DeFi by Elena Burger summarizes insights from TLDR fellows on key optimization challenges in DeFi related to MEV, interoperability, liquidity fragmentation, and more.
- 5 Myths About MEV: Separating Fiction from Reality in Decentralized Finance by Krzysztof Gogol explains different types of MEV, common misconceptions, and methods to mitigate its negative externalities.
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Dark Pools In DeFi: Part Three by Emmanuel Awosika and Koray Akpinar outlines Railgun’s dark pool design leveraging zk-SNARKs to enable private, programmable transactions.
- Khalani Arcadia: An Open Platform for Intent-Driven Agent Collaboration by Khalani Network presents the Arcadia Intents Protocol, designed to address chain fragmentation through intent-based execution and modular interoperability.
- Post by Kevin Wang
- Thread by Khalani Network
- Post by Kevin Wang
- Unpacking The Next Generation Of Ethereum L2s (IV): Gigagas Rollups by Pavel Paramonov details how gigagas rollups like RISE aim to achieve 1Ggas/s by leveraging parallel execution.
- Based Ultrachain by Sam Battenally provides an overview of the current state of the based rollup ecosystem, outlining standardization efforts and designs for preconfirmations.
Posts & Threads
- storm published a thread proposing an adjustment EIP-1559’s gas utilization target from 50% to 75% as a method to increase L1 throughput.
- Forum post by storm
- Charlie Noyes published a post arguing that only a tiny subset of rollups, without meaningful MEV, should be based.
- Reply by @dmarz
- Reply by Sam Battenally
- Barnabé Monnot published a thread sharing recent publications and collaborations from EF Research.
- cyber•Fund published a thread highlighting two publications as a result of their MVI Grants on Ethereum issuance.
- Optimism published a thread detailing how Moonwell captures OEV by charging an MEV tax on liquidators.
- Profesor Utonio published a post describing Espresso’s shared sequencing marketplace, designed to enhance cross-chain composability while preserving rollup sovereignty.
Talks & Discussions
- Bankless: Unichain is Live! What This Means For The Future of DeFi invites Hayden Adams to discuss the launch of Unichain, and how it’s designed to enhance the scalability and efficiency of DeFi.
- Based and Native Rollups hosted by binji and Justin Drake brought together L2 teams and infrastructure providers to explore the future of rollups, scaling, and collaboration.
- Deeply Intents hosted by apriori:
- The Ecosystem is Moving invites Bo Du to discuss rollup clusters, high-performance infrastructure, latency, and more.
- Your Favourite KOL’s Favourite KOL invites c-node for a conversation on based rollups, MEV, L2 bridge hacks, and more.
- The Rollup: Pre-Confs, Native Rollups, and Based Ethereum Designs invites Ceciliaz_, Kubi Mensah, and jeffy xcx to discuss native rollups, based rollups, and preconfirmations.
- VM Wars: The Great Ethereum Debate: Leadership, L2s, and the Future of ETH invites Martin Köppelmann to dive into the current state of Ethereum, native rollups, and interoperability.
- Bell Curve x Expansion: Crypto’s Speculative Phase & Ethereum’s Mass Reform invites Nick White, Jill Gunter, and Uma Roy to discuss native rollups, interoperability, and more.
- PEEPanEIP hosted by Pooja Ranjan:
- Increase calldata invites Toni Wahrstätter to present how EIP-7623 adjusts calldata cost to reduce the maximum possible block size and its variance without negatively impacting regular users.
- RIP-7759 Layer 2 Transaction Fee Specification invites Andreas Freund to describe how RIP-7759 aims to standardize transaction fee specification for L2s.
- A Fast Confirmation Rule for the Ethereum Protocol invites Roberto Saltini to present A Fast Confirmation Rule for the Ethereum Consensus Protocol by Aditya Asgaonkar, Francesco D’Amato, Roberto Saltini, Luca Zanolini, Chenyi Zhang.
- Core Notes from Core Devs Ep. 2 with Terence Tsao, Emmanuel Nalepa, James He, and Preston Van Loon discuss scaling, PeerDAS, and Ethereum governance.
- Unifying Ethereum - Phase 1: Universal Intents Engine with Steven Goldfeder and Ed Felten explore interoperability and Arbitrum’s universal intents engine.
- Deep Dive into Ethereum 7702 Smart Accounts: security risks, footguns and testing by tincho walks through the implementation of EIP-7702, its benefits, challenges, and UX implications.
Other
- MEV-Boost community call #12 by Alex Stokes scheduled for Feb 19, invites the MEV-Boost community to discuss Pectra readiness, bid pricing, header timestamps, and more.
- Post by Alex Stokes
- Pectra Retrospective by Tim Beiko invited client teams, infrastructure providers, and community members to share retrospectives regarding Pectra’s development, and the ACD processes in general.
- [Idea] Devnet environment for end-to-end testing BuilderNet images by @metachris outlines an initial setup for a local devnet environment for e2e testing BuilderNet images.
- Ethereum-wide Interoperability by Josh Rudolf, Skeletor Spaceman and Joxes.eth organizes work related to Ethereum-wide interoperability efforts, including documentation, technical specifications, and more.
- Post by Josh Rudolf
- Ethereum Dashboards by Ether Alpha is a collection of dashboards illuminating the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Constraints API Specifications by Fabric defines open and neutral API specification for proposer commitments on Ethereum.
- Thread by Fabric
- Post by Kubi Mensah
- Thread by Fabric
- Protocol Guild 2024 Report by Protocol Guild covers Protocol Guild’s impact in 2024, expanded membership, and efforts to establish sustainable funding going forward.
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