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
- The Block Auction Arms Race by @dataalways examines the evolving bidding patterns in MEV-Boost over the past two years, and the increasing importance of latency and relay optimizations.
- Welcoming a new EF leadership structure by Ethereum Foundation announces the appointment of Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak to co-Executive Directors of the Ethereum Foundation.
- A new chapter in the infinite garden by Aya Miyaguchi announces her transition from Executive Director to President of the Ethereum Foundation while emphasizing Ethereum’s core values of decentralization, resilience, and credible neutrality.
- Post by Aya Miyaguchi
- Post by Vitalik Buterin
- Building for the long-term: making Base faster, simpler, and more powerful by Base presents three new upgrades to Base — Flashblocks for 10x speed, Base Appchains for L3 scalability, and Smart Wallet Sub Accounts for streamlined UX.
- Sealed transactions by Anders Elowsson presents a design to mitigate MEV via an encrypted mempool where transactions are committed in one block and revealed in a subsequent block.
- Smart Account Encrypted Mempools by Marc Harvey-Hill explores the concept of using smart accounts to validate that encrypted mempool rules are followed.
- Selfish mining under general stochastic rewards by Maryam Bahrani, Michael Neuder, and S. Matthew Weinberg presents a framework for analyzing selfish mining strategies in Bitcoin under more general miner reward functions that could be stochastic, variable in time, and/or ephemeral.
- An Overview of Uniswap v4 for Researchers by Brad Bachu, Joel Hasbrouck, Fahad Saleh, and Xin Wan provides an overview of Uniswap v4 and details how hooks enable tailored liquidity pool designs such as dynamic trading fees, novel pricing rules, and new order types.
- Post by Fahad Saleh
- Post by Xin Wan
- Smart Contract Commitment Attacks by Daji Landis examines the game-theoretic implications of absolute commitments in smart contracts, with examples on MEV extraction and potential attacks on EIP-1559.
- Vote Buying as a Service, LobbyFi and DarkDAOs by Patrick McCorry analyzes the emergence of vote-buying-as-a-service in DAOs, detailing LobbyFi’s approach and the broader consequences for decentralized governance.
- Native Rollups - Promises and Challenges by Mohammad Jahanara discusses the challenges and trade-offs in achieving L1 security with native rollups while maintaining rollup flexibility.
- Revisit Native Rollups by Jünger explores native rollups, detailing their benefits and potential upgrades to improve efficiency.
- Dynamic Blob Sizing: Reducing Zero-Padding Overhead in Small Rollups by 1xiaoxiao11111111 proposes a dynamic blob sizing mechanism for EIP-4844 that allows rollups to pay only for the space they use, without waiting to accumulate additional data.
- How To Make Cross-Chain Tokens Fungible Again: Part II by Alex Hook and Emmanuel Awosika details how ERC-7281 is designed to streamline cross-chain token transfers, reduce liquidity fragmentation, and give token issuers greater control over bridging mechanisms.
- Decentralized Random Block Proposal: Eliminating MEV and Fully Democratizing Ethereum by malik outlines a design intended to democratize block building and reduce MEV by having all nodes run the same block building algorithm.
- Introducing Gas Network by Blocknative introduces Gas Network as a decentralized oracle protocol designed to bring Web3 gas markets onchain.
Posts & Threads
- caspar published a thread detailing the current priorities of the Robust Incentives Group, focused on staking, scaling execution, and scaling data.
- Barnabé Monnot published a thread sharing publications and collaborations by EF Research from the previous week.
- Tim Beiko published a thread outlining the status of Holešky after Pectra activation, actions being taken to finalize the chain, and the unaffected timeline for Sepolia.
- PBS Foundation published a thread summarizing MEV-Boost community call #12 that discussed Pectra readiness, BuilderNet, and more.
- Mikerah published a post explaining how TEEs could have mitigated the recent attack involving Safe and Bybit by providing remote attestation to verify code integrity
- f(gautham) published a thread detailing how Flashblocks on Base enables near-instant confirmations and the improvements this will bring to DeFi, gaming, and trading.
- Gattaca published a thread announcing the launch of a based OP Stack devnet together with LambdaClass.
- arixon.eth published a post comparing the trade-offs between centralized sequencers and preconfirmation gateways for based rollups in terms of MEV, composability, and decentralization.
- The Latest in Defi Research published a thread highlighting an upcoming paper that compares execution welfare on solver platforms vs. traditional DEXes.
Talks & Discussions
- Recordings from ETHDenver have been uploaded:
- Scaling Ethereum for Everyone with Tom Vieira and Evin McMullen
- The Dirty Secret of Solver Markets by Gregory Markou
- Taking Ethereum Back to First Principles: tee/acc in 2025 by Deli Gong
- If You’re in Infra, Pivot to Apps: The Story Behind Unichain by Zach Wong
- Leveraging MEV for Your Customers with Theo Powers and Carl DiClementi
- Preconfirmations and Based Sequencing by Irfan Shaik
- Surveying Stakers: What We Learned About Stakers and Why It Matters by Jonathan Meyer
- Visions of Ethereum and the Path Ahead by Ben Jones
- Indexed Podcast: The $1.5B Bybit Hack, Crypto’s Largest Hack Ever by hildobby, Boxer, and @sui414 discuss the recent Bybit hack and the impact on DeFi.
- Post by Indexed Podcast
- Post by @sui414
- Coordinated: How Primev is Making Ethereum 10x Faster invites Murat Akdeniz for a conversation on preconfirmations, mev-commit, and Primev.
- Post by Coordinated
- Post by Primev
- Beam Call #2 hosted by Justin Drake invites speakers from the Beam Chain ecosystem to share research updates related to post-quantum cryptography.
- EIP-7732 breakout room #17 hosted by Potuz covered devnet stability, proposed spec changes, fork choice challenges, and next steps for EIP-7732 development.
- Talking Tokens Podcast: Fixing Ethereum’s Interoperability with Open Intents Framework invites Hart Lambur and Nam Chu Hoai to discuss interoperability, and how The Open Intents Framework aims to solve chain fragmentation.
- Post by Talking Tokens Podcast
- Post by Jacquelyn Melinek
- Post by Eda
Other
- GCP Mempool Dumpster Public Data by @tesa announces the availability of Mempool Dumpster data on Google Cloud Web3 Portal and BigQuery, offering free access to historical mempool transactions.
- Buildathon: 2025-02-flash by Base details a one-day Builder Side Quest to showcase Flashblocks’ 10x speed improvement for Base with 200ms block times.
- Post by Tom Vieira
- PBH-CTF by World presents a CTF event where participants compete to find bugs in the Priority Blockspace for Humans system on World Chain Sepolia, running from February 28 to March 8.
- TLDR February Newsletter by The Latest in Defi Research features updates from fellows, councilmembers, and other researchers in the TLDR ecosystem.
- SuperchainArb by Eremeyen, Akhil, and Arnav Kumar demonstrates a proof-of-concept implementation of cross-chain arbitrage using SuperchainERC20 interoperability.
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