We of crypto twitter have been yapping about intents for a while now so
@gakonst
and I wanted to write more than a 240 chars about the idea
In particular, it felt important to lay out the *risks* to the eth community along with the sunshine and rainbows
Want to delve deeper into the dark forest?
Curious about the future of MEV?
Researcher looking for the hottest open problems?
Flashbots and
@ethereum
are hosting a 🔥 workshop on MEV + PBS research at SBC ‘22
⚡️Stanford; 1st of Sept⚡️
Application link:
The interface between a protocol and its users is at the core of MEV
I did my best to aggregate all the useful info on PBS in one place, including a bunch of open questions relating both to mainnet and other chains/L2s
Let me know what I missed
1) yesterday at Columbia,
@drakefjustin
gave a great talk outlining an approach to building encrypted mempools as a means to dealing with sandwiches (mafiaEV) and censorship
A bunch of recent developments are pointing at the coming of integrated builder-relays
I wrote a post to summarise why I think this the case and to identify some things that we could do in response
Looking to get the thoughts of others here
One of our researchers Christoph and
@kakia1989
strike again with a seminal look at shared sequencing economics
Shared sequencers are often thought of as a way to enhance MEV revenue for rollups and this paper examines whether and when this is true - with some surprises
When should a blockchain sell its blockspace?
Some designs propose that blockchains sell the right to produce a block way in advance of a slot in contrast to how MEV-Boost works on Ethereum today
@ConorMcMenamin9
and I wrote a post to unpack this a bit
I had a few people ask me how SUAVE would ever be able to produce competitive blocks. I think this question comes mostly from the fact that we have explained things mostly from the user angle and not the searcher/builder angle
A few thoughts:
Its a bird! Its a plane! Its an MEV article to liven up your Monday evening 🤠
This article builds on a previous post and looks at order flow auctions as a way to counteract the dangers of exclusive order flow
A bunch of bikini models who just joined twitter have recently gotten really into TEEs
Either that or there’s a new wave of twitter bots
I know which I’m choosing to believe
The sender of a calendly link is able to perform a stackelberg attack but they give up last look
the value of sending vs receiving a calendly link depends on schedule volatility and the computational cost of updating availability (aka time liquidity)
mev microstructure quiz
searcher X knows what the state of the chain will be after the next block some time period t before that information is public
how can X exercise their advantage?
how significant is the advantage?
how does the advantage grow as function of t/blocktime?
Are you ready for some MEV-pilling, anon?
Too far or couldn't get a ticket? Follow us further down the rabbit hole from afar:
Haven't applied? Do so. We saved some JIT seats for latecomers
Been accepted? Register on eventbrite or get risk being frontrun
Want to delve deeper into the dark forest?
Curious about the future of MEV?
Researcher looking for the hottest open problems?
Flashbots and
@ethereum
are hosting a 🔥 workshop on MEV + PBS research at SBC ‘22
⚡️Stanford; 1st of Sept⚡️
Application link:
It’s funny that people meme the AI<>crypto narratives and yet most volume on chain is algorithmic trading and tg bots trading for degens and then probably bots backrunning those with all the txns being algorithmically ordered
Keep making bots/algos smarter and what do you get?
Listening to
@Tim_Roughgarden
talk about what makes mechanism design in blockchain harder than traditional settings at columbia today was incredibly inspiring
really feels like solving coordination problems in the space will extend way past blockchain, changing the game fr fr
We are excited to release Reth v0.1.0-alpha! 🎉🎉🎉
Reth is a modular, contributor-friendly, and blazing-fast Ethereum node, in Rust, using the Apache/MIT license.
Let's unpack what is behind today's release.
Some good news, frens
We have secured a larger venue and have capacity for more MEV-curious folks
If you're still around after SBC, come join us at the same venue ⚡️
Are you ready for some MEV-pilling, anon?
Too far or couldn't get a ticket? Follow us further down the rabbit hole from afar:
Haven't applied? Do so. We saved some JIT seats for latecomers
Been accepted? Register on eventbrite or get risk being frontrun
Blockchains sit at the intersection of cryptography, distributed systems and economics
Focusing only on one or two of the three lenses (eg honest majority assumption) doesn't quite cut it
Our paper attempts to bring a holistic conversation around encrypted mempools to the fore
did my best to formulate some DeFi<>Info Theory/Computational Learning Theory/Information Design/??? questions.
If you're mathy or like CS theory and looking for some interesting problems with real applications, look no further
Surprised that
@tzhen
didn’t try to hire Sam Altman
Left unhired for a few more hours and we would have seen the most elaborate last-min cyrptoxai researchathon pop up in SF
I have cumulatively spent years of my life jumping through ill-defined bureaucratic hoops and lost even more in lifespan from the stress this entailed - all to be able to cross some lines in the sand
Well-travelled american: “what does a visa look like?”
😭
the model suggests that for some ordering rules, shared sequencers end up producing *lower* revenue than independent sequencers - adding nuance to the discussion about MEV rebates
paper and discussion here:
FRP is the Flashbots community grants program⚡️🤖
This post highlights MEV research funded through FRP including studies of:
*private mempools
*the impact of frontrunning
*AMM design
*auction design
*PBS
*credible commitments
+ 7 ongoing projects
This whole post basically to say:
* oval is not a chainlike product
* oval can introduce delays?
Wonder if you parameterise to a 1 block delay what the worst could be?
Not like oracle tx have guaranteed inclusion in blocks as it is🤔
Chainlink is committed to helping the blockchain and DeFi industry manage the challenging and multilayered dynamics of onchain value extraction from oracle reports, now being called Oracle Extractable Value (OEV).
Chainlink has been working on solving the complex problems around
MEV use cases are latency-sensitive so ZK tech is still some orders of magnitude from getting there for ePBS and similar
what we do have today is TEE proofs *shrugs*
Lots of controversy around arbitrum txn sequencing proposal
Putting aside the actual implementation, it’s awesome that crypto gives us the opportunity to experiment with new mechanisms like this.
Lots of experiments and a lot of it in the open
Added some useful wiki's to the flashbots forum:
* a wiki to keep track of SUAVE-related talks, posts and discussions for people to get up to speed quickly
* a wiki for MEV data (shill your dashboard/tool/analysis/api here)
What will be valuable in the metaverse? Land seems unlikely to be the answer. Instead, we should look to what is valuable on web 2 for some insights.
I explore this idea in Land, Teleportation & Web Dynamics In The Metaverse:
🧵/7 👇🏻
🚨Private orderflow & the block builder market🚨
Recent censorship concerns are thankfully waking the community up to some of the threats that we need to build around
But now we need to talk about the next topic nobody is talking about yet - exclusive private orderflow
7/ Other questions on my mind
-allocation/welfare impact of privacy gadgets
-considerations on consensus, latency, more on side channels & robustness
-design trade-offs on how to implement: separate L1, some kind of L2, and how these change with MEV distribution across domains
Penultimate episode of Bell Curve w.
@hasufl
is LIVE.
In this episode, we spoke to
@0xQuintus
and
@barnabemonnot
about the future of MEV.
This was a can't miss, enjoy!
Apple:
Spotify:
This is great. We could use more formality in analysing what happens between order creation and execution.
What happens when we apply this framework to threshold encrypted mempools, RFQ, CLOB's etc? Can you prove that your "MEV solution" is better than another?
it feels really clear that there is a gravitational pull for most off-chain financial applications to be subsumed by the builder role who has more info (e.g. can route optimally against state)
good for efficiency and bad for decentralisation: that's why we need suave
What's the most comprehensive doc covering PBS?
Ideally should take someone who knows blockchains relatively well but nothing about PBS to a point where they understand both the abstraction of PBS and the current market setup relatively well
Intents aim to allow users to give control over their assets to third parties, but to finely tune exactly how much control you give.
Basically a user signs a message "any state transition that satisfies [these conditions] has my approval"
🧱🔀 Programmable block space is more than just transactions anon! Using SUAVE
@MihaLotric
👨💻 was able to build an auction for the extra data in an L1 block! 🎯 See the demo below, live on SUAVE ☀️ and Goerli 🌐. Programmable block space future is coming soon! 🧠🔨 ✨
One of the most thought provoking pieces in this space.
Expedient intent implementations are a continuation and magnification of existing centralization of MEV supply chain. And god I see so many bad intent implementations that just centralizes the market.
Increase your OFA auction revenue with this one simple trick! Auction theorists hate him!
New working paper released: Contingent Fees in Order Flow Auctions
We've heard of CLOBs and batch auctions
They're well studied in academia but in crypto, we see some much weirder stuff
Block building and the auctions around it (like MEV-share and blocker) are mostly unstudied theoretically... until now
1/
Glad to announce the completion of my research on the game theory of arbitrage and blind sandwiching in backrun auctions such as MEV-Share & MEV-Blocker. Big thanks to Flashbots and their FRP programme for funding this work!
@_danielmarzec
@MaxResnick1
Was planning to release this ROP next week but we'd be interested to think more about it! h/t to
@0xQuintus
for sharing your note too, great stuff to get started
Lido has incentive to ensure all staked eth be under Lido’s control
Lido makes deal with newly launching but highly anticipated “AVS” to accept only steth as collateral in exchange for some revshare over several years
Now other staking tokens need to strike similar deals or die
There are a bunch of way of structuring an order flow auction
There seem to be some common problems/characteristics with a bunch of the designs which mostly relate to:
- info exposure
- granularity of auction
"applications integrating across the stack" seems like a natural theme following modularity
sequencing, exec, DA layers + bb layer (solver/intent nwks, suave) + avs
we can leverage these layers better by spreading app logic across them
cosmos ahead in this w block sdk
Oval helps lending protocols capture millions of dollars of free money each year.
But MEV capture is only possible thanks to the infrastructure built by Flashbots.
Oval is the first application built on Flashbot’s MEV-Share protocol. Here’s why that matters.🥚👇
Flashbots is
wat do?
probably depends on the application but people setting up intent infra should be aware of these issues
the ol' adage still seems relevant
* illuminate
* democratise (access to order flow, lower barriers to entry)
* distribute (prevent rent seeking/entrnchment)
NeurIPS 2023 is upon us
At the Multi-agent Security workshop on Saturday,
@sxysun1
we'll be presenting our recent work on using Blockchains as infrastructure to guarantee AI security & cooperation
"Cooperative AI via Decentralized Commitment Devices"
What's the bull case for not minimising MEV? (where minimisation includes MEV flowing back to user)
Economic security budget?
@tarunchitra
and
@ks_kulk
's argument/findings that MEV and DeFi yield are correlated so MEV disincentivises validator unstaking for yield farming?
I need some source(s) to cite for the claim that “a lot of DeFi volume goes through private rpcs” (e.g. RFQs, bundle API’s, direct from builder)
Any recs?
... The Cathedral and the MEVzaar
10am-6pm GMT, Mar 12, London
Registration:
Livestream:
Agenda is live now on (Yes, that's the link!)
Pre-reading homework will be up tonight.
Prep
but permissioned "intentpools" have a lot of risks associated:
- if the wrong set is given exclusive access to intents, this risks centralising the builder market ()
The first set of speakers for is confirmed, and Wave 1 of general acceptance tickets has gone out yesterday 📬
If you applied, check you email! We'll be sending out another batch of tickets, and announcing more speakers, in the next day or two 🕳️🐇
this should sound familiar bc intents aren't really new (think CoWswap, some RFQs)
for some reason (maybe 4337 and anoma, suave entering the zeitgeist) the topic has gained a lot of attention recently
Is the idea with solana fees that eventually a transaction will be charged more for touching two “hotspots” (interfering w parallelism) than for touching those those two hotspots in separate txs?
Cc
@PGarimidi
@0xShitTrader
* Tokens on binance: give up all control to cz but slick UX
* Self-custody and sending transactions: retain max sovereignty but u have to do a lot of work
What's in between? Intents
@MaxResnick1
@thegostep
Not saying the conclusion is wrong, but seems hard to draw conclusions from an audience where a lot of the smartest practitioners have a habit and inventive of being very secretive
You often hear cryptopolitics takes like “ethereum is like a country, l2s are like…” etc which are useful
But I feel like the validators-as-political-entities perspective is underrepresented (except maybe in cosmos?)
a small christmas present 🎁 for cryptotwitter – we are ecstatic to share "Execution Tickets," an idea from
@drakefjustin
on a reimagined blockspace market!
dive into the design + implications here↓
👽🎟️
thanks for reading, and see you next year🎄🪩🎉
What if the MEV supply chain has two poles? and the real economic game is between users and validators across time?
Where is the middle between the poles and what happens there?
The rabbithole really is deep