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.
See our Transparency Reports for deeper dives into updates related to Flashbots.
Papers & Articles
- Blockchain Privacy and Regulatory Compliance: Towards a Practical Equilibrium by Vitalik Buterin, Jacob Illum, Matthias Nadler, Fabian Schär and Ameen Soleimani study Privacy Pools, a novel privacy-enhancing protocol that allows users to prove that their funds (do not) originate from known (un-)lawful sources, without publicly revealing their entire transaction graph.
- RIG Update #2 — Science of Blockchain Conference (SBC) 2023 by RIG provides a summary of their latest research, a recap of SBC, and what’s next.
- Fun and games with inclusion lists by Barnabé Monnot looks at the behaviors, games and attacks that may arise between rational proposers and builders as a consequence of inclusion lists.
- Has anyone checked on EIP-1559 recently? by James Prestwich presents a way for proposers and builders to collude and circumvent EIP-1559’s fee adjustments by increasing the gas target while keeping the actual block size small.
- Strong Builder Identity for Combating Builder Imposter Attacks by Max Resnick, Mallesh Pai and Kobi Gurkan suggest builder signatures as a stronger identity system for block builders, motivated by the recent impersonation of Titan builder.
- The False Narrative of MEV Protection: How Private Transactions Can Result in a Poorer Settlement Than Sending Publicly by Blair Marshall investigates why some private transactions incur more slippage than public transactions.
- Why multi-prover matters. SGX as a possible solution. by Lisa A. and Brecht Devos explores how a multi-prover approach can hedge the risk of bugs and vulnerabilities in proving systems, with a focus on SGX.
Posts & threads
- SMG published a thread on the vertical integration between builders and searchers by analyzing the top-of-block bundle market.
- The mev.fyi project: MEV research content aggregator and search engine by Valentin announces the mev.fyi project and encourages community contributions of resources related to MEV, incentive alignment, mechanism design, and their implications in the blockchain ecosystem.
- Louis published a thread on how “MEV-Boost+” and “MEV-Boost++”, described in Censorship Resistance with Restaking by EigenLayer, would enhance Ethereum’s liveness guarantees and censorship resistance.
- Stephy published a thread on modular blockchains and how different rollup architectures handle settlement, sequencing, verification and data availability.
- Steven Goldfeder published a post to clarify the different meanings people assign to the term “decentralized sequencer” in the context of rollups.
- Empowering Innovation: ERC-4337 Account Abstraction Grant Round Recipients by erc4337 announce the 18 recipients of the Ethereum Account Abstraction grant round.
Talks & Discussions
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Community Call ft. Flashbots hosted by Rocket Pool invited Hasu to talk about the history of Flashbots, from mev-geth and Flashbots Protect to MEV-Boost, MEV-Share and SUAVE.
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Zero Knowledge - MEV, Mechanism Design & the Censorship Problem with Mallesh M Pai invited Tarun Chitra and Mallesh Pai to explore mechanism design and Mallesh’s research on MEV and censorship.
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Scraping Bits: MEV Operator Opens Up: Inside A Top 1% Web3 MEV Team Turned To Block Building - Ft. 0xPrincess by DeGatchi had 0xprincess on to talk about their experience as a searcher and block builder.
Other
- The RareSkills Book of Gas Optimization by Jesserc, michaelamadi.eth and supernovahs is an extensive collection of tricks and best practices for gas optimization in Solidity.
- banteg, Mikko Ohtamaa and others have pooled together a bounty for anyone who can demonstrate that an allowance frontrun has happened in the wild.
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