Episode 243: Dive Back into MEV with Alex Stokes and Chris Hager

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week taron and i revisit the topic of mev with guests chris hager from the flashbots team and alex stokes from the ef this is not the first time we're covering mev on the show over a year ago we did an episode with the flashbots

team looking at mev that was much more of a primer and something i recommend listening to before this one if you want to find out just generally what mev is i'll add the link to that in the show notes in this particular episode we're going to be teasing out more of the nuances around mev and look at how the field has evolved since that last episode we explore how the mev space could look like after the merge the concept of pbs or proposer builder separation what each role in the mev landscape actually does and will do as well as what the mev boost architecture looks like we touch on future ideas around mev and democratization of rewards we talk about the work that tyrone recently released on mev how tornado cash

sanctions affected the project and cryptographic solutions that might be able to prevent some kinds of mev this was a really nice deep dive and i think it brings us up to date on this important topic now before we kick off i just want to let you know about two initiatives happening in our community right now the first is the zk whiteboard sessions this is a new series of educational videos that we're releasing weekly and they're focused on the concepts and terms that we talk about on the zk front this is a great place to start learning about zero knowledge proofs if you don't fully understand what we're talking about in that context check it out this was produced by zk hack in collaboration with polygon i'll add the link to that in the show notes and join our discord

let us know what you think i'm getting a lot of really good feedback on it and i'd love to hear from you if there's some topics or concepts that we are missing that you think we should cover in order to help you better learn what's happening in zk the second thing i want to highlight is the zk jobs board right now there's a fresh batch of open rolls from zkfocus projects posted there so if you're looking for a job or if you just want to understand what teams are looking for this would be a great place to check it out also if you're hiring be sure to add your job to the zk jobs board today so now i want to invite tanya to share a little bit about this week's sponsor today's episode is sponsored by polygon introducing polygon zk evm we all know

that ethereum needs to scale and polygon believes that zero knowledge tech is the best way forward polygon's vision for zk evm is simple developers can seamlessly deploy any ethereum smart contract to a layer 2 and benefit from the scaling power of zk proofs it's also permissionless meaning anyone can use it and open source polygon zk evm was built by polygon but it's for anyone who wants a cheaper and faster way to use ethereum without sacrificing security or decentralization they will be releasing a public test net soon which will be an opportunity to test their work and make improvements if you'd like to learn more about polygon zk evm and stay up to date on the latest then fill out the form in the show notes so thank you again polygon now here is anna's dive back into mev with alex

stokes and chris hager [Music] today we're here with chris hagar from the flashbots team and alex stokes from the ef we're going to be diving back into the topic of mev i want to say welcome to both of you hi anna great to be here yup hey anna great to be here as well excited to talk about mev today nice taroun is joining us today to co-host this episode so welcome back to roon it's been a few months since you've been on so i'm happy to have you hey what's up it's been a leconic summer i feel like the last time i was on the show everything was blowing up in the world and now it's sort of chilled out has it i think in the zk space like the last two weeks have been

our whirlwind but we'll get to that in a second yeah i feel like that's the only thing where there's been any kind of like uh big drama actually no any vlan has had a lot of drama as we'll talk about today anyway yeah very cool so last year i actually did an episode on mev with james prestwich we interviewed phil and alex from the flashbots team i actually re-listened to that episode before doing this one and i was kind of amazed at how little i understood about the concept back then and how i hope i feel like i definitely have been like following it much closer since then i feel like generally as an ecosystem i feel like people understand it better nowadays and so i'm very

excited to do this interview where we're going to dive back in to maybe tease out some more nuances about the mev space look forward at what's coming down to the pipeline and also obviously talk about kind of the latest drama focused very much on like tornado and zk stuff and privacy and how this impacts things like mev but i think before we do that i'd love to learn about both of you so alex why don't you tell us a little bit about what led you to work on this problem oh boy uh okay so i've been working on with you know all about ethereum for quite a while now um and i think my entry into the space was research at this point you know several

years ago into proof of stake and you know i'm sure everyone listening is aware of the merge that's about to happen so that's all very exciting you you know you anna given your your experience of like yeah like you know i i like had this movie concept and i feel like i didn't quite understand like all the implications and then now there's like so much more and there's just like this like you know this thread you can keep pulling i think that mirrors my experience a lot where like you know i heard about mev uh there's all the work the flashback team has been doing you know for a year or so now and either way uh well yeah so where i first entered into into mev being relevant and important was for consensus uh i don't know how much we'll get into it today but essentially like if you think

about it like when you when you add blocks to the chain some of them have muv and this muv like changes the incentives around you know extending the chain versus reorganic chain and things like this and yeah again i don't know how much i want to get into that but the point being is that actually there's like very deep you know profound implications for security of blockchains when mev exists and then you start thinking about this and you realize that movie is everywhere and it always exists and it becomes yeah at least for me i've just become like obsessed with like first answering the question what is it maybe and then also understanding like security implications for for these systems that that we use cool what time frame was that when did you join the project so i've been there for four years now and again my entry was uh yeah way way

back when like i i just started sort of contributing in open source capacity on uh early versions of you know now we have the merge let's move to perfect stake in the early days there was even an idea to do uh sort of this like casper finality gadget on top of the work chain and even manage all the validators within a smart contract so it was like a very interesting idea and we've we've come very far in our thinking around how to do this but yeah like that was like sort of my initial intro uh into things and yeah just just you know this is like the most interesting thing i can certainly find and uh hopefully you know there's like some very good benefit from it so here i am keeps me keeps me engaged

um what you just said this is like a little aside but like was that finality gadget meant to deal with mev i actually never oh well i mean again this will probably be my like my party line is that mev is everywhere and okay it's always applicable but um i don't know that's the thing like even back then no one like we didn't even really have this tournament maybe right like there were you know i think people understood that you could for example have like dex arbitrage and that could like have implications for like how people were like building blocks and how the chains formed and stuff like this but it definitely wasn't thought about as this like almost abstraction that like we have whereas very much at least for me it's like the way i think about it is like

you put blocks on the chain and like the blocks have like mev sort of hanging off of them and like this is like very important again for security because it changes the incentives like very drastically got it all right chris let's find out about you what led you to work on this project i started at flashbots about a year ago 13 months i was previously in in active in blockchain for a number of years with decentralized exchanges doing open source tooling for some ethereum projects for the new blockchain and others then i was doing a extended parental leave and after that like right in the middle of my parent leave there was this whole development of the mvv

papers and flashbacks bringing up solutions to the gas wars and other problems and i was looking for new interesting things to work on and started digging into ethereum reorgs and writing some react monitor software that keeps track of ongoing and reworks in in in deep detail and so are the paths of my projects and flashbots aligned and we started collaborating more and then i started full time on flashbots then first i was working on flashbot protect and more of the user-facing mav protection products and then

at some point we just needed manpower on uh math boost and our pbs block streams and i was happy to start there and really got yeah very deep into it and very excited about it and it was just at the right time when all the mvv boost specifications were co-developed with the ethereum foundation and the consensus client teams and this was a very intense half a year so far for me diving deep into mvv boost and all the implications and other projects around cool you've both just mentioned mev boost what is that versus what was being built before like what

what's different about mev boost or is it just the formalization and kind of the naming of what was being built before so before or the current if you're in one set of bits flashbots is sending bundles to miners and other parties sending bundles to miners and the miners assemble the blocks in ethereum 2 it's different in the sense that the proposers the validators they run the consensus client software and they fall back to a local execution layer software like gaf or another mind or other to produce the blocks and they can reach out to meth boost relays

to provide blocks for them but they do not know the contents of the blog so that transactions they are removed and the proposals have the choice of signing this block for a certain value that the relay is claiming this block provides and after the signature the proposal receives the block content for proposal maf boost here is just a small piece of open source infrastructure that runs on the proposal server that is a relay multiplexer so mav boost is capable of connecting to many relays and asking many relays for possible blocks and providing the best to the proposer

okay cool but in what you just described is this being built primarily for the post merge or is this something that's already been used today it's exclusively for ethereum tool okay so it's only been used currently on like the test net mode and like okay so it's not it's not live yet yeah exactly i mean another way of putting it is it allows connecting to a external builder network to receive blocks from other parties outside parties and the proposers the validators not being trusted so that's why they signed the blocks blinded with other transactions so they do not steal the transactions basically the mav from the transactions from searchers

okay yeah and so i think you know i think chris gave you a nice overview of like mev boost and what the software is today and maybe this will be like a helpful arc for just this episode generally because i would like to you know provide some more context that this is like an implementation of this thing called pbs proposer builder separation so uh you know this technique is i mean again it's what chris said right it's there's this like external builder network and proposers validators in this merged ethereum ecosystem they you know are the ones tasked with making the blocks getting the blocks out to the network all of this and i'll just talk about pbs that we hear is just recognizing the fact that like mev

is a thing kind of what i said a second ago like there will always be me v maybe is like a reality we must deal with and so because of that we say okay are there things we can do to manage or mitigate some of the externalities of the movie and there certainly are um at all layers of the stack honestly like from people using wallets to you know these more like infrastructure providers chris mentioned the relays to all the way to the validators doing their job and what we would like to do is say okay uh because we you know can likely have all these mitigations and ways to like help the situation generally uh we can then ask okay can we take some of those into the protocol and that's like where i think we'd all like to go some years down the road uh towards an

enshrined pbs solution and today like this is part of what flashbots is doing is saying okay we're not going to put this into the protocol anytime soon and so instead let's do essentially off change solutions that gives us room for experimentation and yeah just time to like gather more data and see how these systems behave and then that's you know i think ultimately what we're all trying to build towards cool one thing i think that might actually be helpful for listeners who probably who haven't heard about pbs before is maybe walking through the sort of you know verbally the sequence diagram of like how say like block producers aggregate transactions then relay them to a proposal and the

proposer picks kind of the highest bid because i think that would kind of make it a little easy to see why you need sort of this infrastructure for managing many builders in the future i guess i just mean like the person who maybe for the first time is hearing about this might not even know that what the design space looks like right and i think part of that comes from like what the sort of queries that are made are right there's like the user submitting a transaction to block builders there's a block builder submitting a block via different relayers like maybe like kind of going through what the things are that make this kind of a complicated problem might be a good thing for listeners right so

we have thrown all these terms around so far right there's like proposers validators relayers builders there's the users who are using the system there's there's like all these actors and circus right searchers exactly so there's always these actors and what's becoming a very sophisticated ecosystem and maybe it's helpful then just to like walk through uh sort of this like pipeline there's uh some of the flashbacks team members have been working on this like mev supply chain diagram which i think is really it's really helpful framing for like understanding different actors and kind of how these pieces fit together so on the one end you have users who are you know us using the chain let's say we want to like make some you know dex trade so we

go do this you know in a pre-flashbots world let's say like when we don't have this infrastructure for this thing that kind of looks like this pbs this proposer builder separation i just broadcast my transaction to the whole world right the public mempool and this is well it's many things it's very exciting at least because now there are specialized actors like chris mentioned called searchers and searchers are these like again very specialized sophisticated players in the world and all they want to do is like try to find mev they do this because like they can actually you know collect them evie themselves so it's essentially some reward for their job their work and uh they do this so with like my dex example uh there could essentially be

like this arbitrage that the searcher is going to do one example is like if i have my trade and i take like say a unisop pool out of balance the searcher can come and back run me and basically restore the balance of the pair uh this is like the mev they could take is this searcher a bot that's built by a unique like an individual or is this like a tool set that's provided by the flashbots libraries right uh i think a mix of both chris can probably say more oh yeah but it's mostly individuals or small companies that run bots that submit these transactions to the flashboard's infrastructure which routes it to the builders

okay cool i do want to throw back to another episode in case anyone's curious about this kind of stuff which is i did this episode with the dialectic folks project blanc prop shop and they kind of explained what it was to be the bot maker um i don't know if they're making this kind of bot but just that gave me a lot of context into like what the action of a lot of this stuff actually looks like anyway sorry alex continue well right exactly so yeah there are teams you know like you talk to dean and his team and this is exactly you know some of the work they do is they are one of these like searcher teams searcher funds like however you want to think about it but essentially again yeah they they write software and the software looks at the public pool so that's sort of where

i was in the arc is we now have a transaction in the mempool and you know these searchers it could be individuals but usually they're teams who have these bots this automated software that watches the mobile and it's like okay you know i have the current ethereum state and given all the transactions i see right now uh maybe one of them you know emits some meb and then what i want to do then is make my own transaction that captures this mev uh perhaps for myself um again the design space of what happens to the mi v is quite big but uh that's a much future conversation either way uh the searcher then would try to collect this mev and this is now like where flashbacks entered the scene is like what happens is when we have the situation as i just described you have many people competing for this

mev right so you now have all these searcher teams all over the world it becomes highly competitive and before flashbots the way that you would do this is you would essentially need to outbid everyone in the public pool and with ethereum today what that means is you end up with uh you know i think believe christmas and mentioned gas wars and what that looks like is you know i declare i'll pay x to get my mev extracting transaction on chain someone else sees that and they turn around and make their own transaction because they want the mev so then they say well i need to outbid you to get on change so they'll bid a little bit more right and then now i can turn around and do the same thing and then the other person does the same thing right and then now you have these like wars where

literally what happens is you know if the if the size of the movie opportunity is say like you know this much eth someone will bid you know in the limit they bid you know that much heath minus just a little bit uh because otherwise they wouldn't get anything and this is again one of these externalities that we've been talking about because now you know let's say i separately want to like go vote on some like dow proposal uh the gas is suddenly like through the roof for the whole memphis right and and that's bad so flashbutts came onto the scene and said hey we can start to build things that look like this pbs infrastructure we'll keep talking about today and a lot of what that did was say okay for searchers who want to do this type of thing there's now this like essentially off chain

auction that provides them access to block space almost separate from like this public main pool and by doing that you sort of silo you like firewall off this like the gas games that searchers can play and yeah there's a ton more benefits that i'm sure chris could get into but essentially by doing so you hope to reduce you know this situation where the the gas is suddenly spiking for users who otherwise you know might not care about this like searcher bit anymore they can just use the chain as they they would otherwise um and this this idea of like firewalling this activity off is uh helpful because it's like this is sort of like the design primitive of pbs like this is what we aim to do is like do this sort of thing like if there are these these externalities that the

protocol sort of generates then what we hope to do is is push them to a place where we can control them or at least like reduce their reduce downsides just one question is the searcher the proposer as well or is it like that split that you're talking about between proposer builder like where does the searcher come in right so you have searchers and then the next up so now we have searchers and searchers have found these opportunities there's this word bundle we'll probably keep using chris mentioned where essentially the idea is to extract the mov this way you need to like have a certain sequence of transactions and so with ethereum you basically can submit one transaction that's like the primitive that you have with the protocol so if you need you know to have a

sequence of things then you need to have a bundle which is just many transactions in a particular order so anyway searchers do this they then make these bundles the bundles go to these actors called builders and the distinction here like may blur over time but essentially they're distinct jobs the thinking is that you know searching is so competitive that these are very specialized sort of activities so like they'll be you know searchers that specialize in just arbitrage or just liquidation or well then there's like the long tail of all sorts of things but you can imagine that like you know you you get these these teams of people that are like very focused on one very type of thing they're not going to also be very good

at say building full blocks which is what the builders in this met boost or this pbs world do so now you have builders builders are making full blocks maybe they're taking like you know a collection of bundles they get from like different searchers they're filling the rest of the block with say just regular transactions from the public mempool which could be whatever they don't necessarily need to be mbb transactions just whatever's out there they've now built a full block now we get to the namesake of proposer builder separation which is now the builder has built a block and they have to get this to the proposer right so the they're especially you have to be a special sort of actor on within the protocol to actually propose or like you know include a block in the chain these are the validators

the way ethereum is structured is every so often there's a slot which is just a chunk of time there's one validator per slot that is the proposer they and only they can seal the block they can sign it with you know in cryptographic signature way um in a special way only they know how can they seal the block and then make it uh you know available for inclusion into the chain and then once it does that then you have like some percentage of validators that have to approve it you're not wrong so basically the way to think about it is that there's one validator every slot i use this this word slot so there's one validator every slot who can propose a block and then essentially you know we can get in the details if you want i don't think they're super

relevant the way to think about it is that we then went literally every other validator to like basically a test or like you know they they should produce some proof that they also think this block should be in the chain um and you've talked to other quote eth2 people uh we've moved away from this terminology by the way yeah if you talk to others i have to insert the plot but if you if you talk to the consistent people this is uh you know this is what we say is that you know you have validators of testing to the chain yeah and right like again for other technical reasons that are important it's like sort of blocked you know sort of chunked up into groups of validators called committees but point is is that yes you produce a block and then for it to be given sort

of weight in in the chain as being canonical over another one you then have everyone else attest to the block cool and if you imagine this sort of like um i don't know maybe like a zipper or like uh you know maybe a better better analogy is like having something kind of like freeze like if you imagine there's like an ice cube with like a puddle and then it like freezes towards like you have this this process of finality that runs along the chain and we're looking at the details of it in some some detail right now nice i do need to do an episode on post merge eth soon because i can tell i'm rusty on this i'm very much in like the cosmos tendermint model still so i'm always thinking like two-thirds of the existence anyway but i with so many

validators i understand it's possibly being done differently there's different trade-offs we've made in the design space and yes i'm sure you could have a whole episode just on that alone sounds good and i want to say this is a brilliant overview of the whole pps uh implementation here and mf boost is kind of a stop gap solution towards full pbs that takes a few years probably until it's actually ready and my boost that my boost approach is something we can have right now and we just uh can deliver that at the merge one missing piece here is the relay that we haven't talked about so a builder the block builder can also be a relay in itself

being a relay means providing the builder api there's an ethereum foundation repository called builder specs that defines a certain api on how the proposer reaches out to a blog builder or relay to receive to request a block and then submit the signed block and then receive the payload and i realize nothing else is only implementing this api and it can be only for one included block builder or it can be a relay that accepts blocks from many block builders and only provides the best block to the proposal or maybe a block based on certain preferences and mavboost on top of that is a way

to connect to many of these relays as one proposer the proposer needs to configure specific relays that it trusts to receive the blocks from because there is certain trust needed towards the relays because they can for instance withhold the payloads which leads the proposer to missing the block proposal so there is a certain amount of trust needed from the proposer to the relay does the mev boost actually make something faster more accurate cheaper i'm just curious like what's the actual tangible impact it's just a really multiplexer really like okay the consensus client you can hook up any

consensus client to any single relay not all of them do the signature verifications but you can hook them up to a single builder and math boost is just a piece of software that allows the proposal to use many relays i guess i had a question in terms of like registration like dns style like how does a relay register and is there some sort of like notion of a registry i guess i'm thinking of this from the perspective of like you know when i have this sort of p2p network like say like a codemlia type of thing right you still have to sort of effectively do some peer discovery is there like a a specialized peer discovery protocol here for relayers to register um

well there was a strong argument against these registries because the proposers should know exactly which release they want to trust and to configure so they are configured manually so the proposer in its beacon client software beacon node software configures it really by a domain and a public key of the relay and ensures that all the bits delivered by this relay are signed with the proper key so right now a proposer needs to trust and manually configure each really do you envision that changing if they're suddenly you end up in a world where there's fewer proposers but like a larger set of block builders because like you could

imagine that proposers might actually miss out on quite a bit of revenue if they actually are unable to find all the block builders um i'm giving this as more of a hypothetical but i'm just you know it is something that even at like every single layer one faces this challenge of like how do you do pure discovery amongst nodes and i was just curious if you think at some point that that will be important so builders are very incentivized to make themselves known right like if builders cannot reach proposers then they can't do anything but yeah i mean i to your point turn like i would hope that we move more in this direction where well there's a number of things we can hope to achieve but yes like chris was saying today like this is a very sort of static manual process

uh everyone involved would love to see you know a very sort of open permissionless ecosystem for each of these different roles i just described and then you can imagine like as we build that out what that looks like is yeah there is some sort of peer-to-peer discovery protocol um you know we're a big fan of like using gossip in different places and then you can imagine right like i want to come online as a relay or a builder and then i'm like also being some registration and you know hopefully that starts to move towards this world that's not okay go to flashbots you know you know relays.flashbots.net and figure out where the relays are and this sort of thing um but again it's like to my understanding like flashbots is saying okay you know there's this very important thing we need to do which is

like have some pbs solution and metboost is that thing and so the question is like how can we do that you know in the next month um they've been working on it you know for much longer than that but at this point right the question is like what can we do and you know i think they've made the right decisions to this point and saying okay let's build it this way or that way with the idea being to like have something ready and then you know everyone i know is is very much you know ready for the the next step which is starting to decentralize more and more of these pieces yeah just not here that ethereum health and chain liveness is our top priority and it's important for us to align the current steps towards that

because there is some security implications of adding additional relays or just letting relays include themselves to the proposers because there are certain verification capabilities that need to be developed for that to be totally safe so that's another topic that we maybe touch on later yeah for sure for sure i guess the one question i've maybe given that you mentioned liveness here is suppose i'm an eth validator and i initially had mev boost turned off because i took the ofac list too seriously or something and then i turn it on later um should i expect extra latency or

bandwidth requirements for me that are like quite dramatic relative to running a stock validator i'm just like how much beefier do i need my setup to be for running running it or first not uh not at all like the bandwidth is uh two requests to the relay one to get the header and one to submit the side block and receive the full payload and the size is at most a few hundred kilobytes once per proposal and the delay you can configure your maximum allowed relay delay in mathboost but the flashbots really responds within milliseconds and i think even a few seconds is still on the safe side i wanted to ask like who's running the

mev boost is that the validator it's the proposer who's actually using this tool yes this is just a small slice of software that runs next to the beacon node okay so the consensus layer client and then i have another question is like would the validator actually be running different parts of the stack like would they also be running a builder role would they be doing a relayer like i'm just trying to figure out like would it make any sense for them to actually run more than just like their validator plus mev boost it's conceivable that large sticking pools would be interested in running their own relays just for more control maybe more data visibility and other things but for solo stakers it's not

not a realistic option because it includes a lot of infrastructure and also trust from the block builders and the searches because they trust the builder and the relay with the plain text transactions that contain the mav extraction and that they want to profit of themselves it will be hard for small actors to um basically build profitable blocks that are comparable to the bigger release and kind of like one more thing on what you said alex like on merge day like is this all in place like those different roles being distinct in the way you've described them or is that still sort of theoretical no i mean i would say they're in place

so i mean we definitely have validators and we have you know there'll be proposers then and then the question is right like will there be who are the builders i guess right well okay so this is a good question i mean you know the i think it is early days for this movie boost ecosystem and uh yeah i think it's you know tbd as to exactly how it evolves and that's part of the fun there are a number of organizations that have committed to being relays i think they might all build blocks as well and you know again kind of like i was alluding to a second ago i think everyone involved envisions this like more decentralized network eventually where you can have permissionless building right so you could have just you know specialized

builder actors that are here and then that's where they do need the relays to connect to the proposers and yeah maybe just taking a step back you know like the reason we go to all this trouble in the first place is to support these like smaller validator actors like you can imagine just like foregoing this entire network and just having like you know one huge builder organization directly connected to one huge you know staking pool or some validator organization uh and they just do this and this may happen uh we'll we'll see you know how things shape up um but we definitely have this like very core value in ethereum that like you know validation for example should be within reach of like most users right at least we should like strive towards this ideal because it helps decentralization

so we do this and then you you know given the previous claim right that like you know there are these returns to scale with mev maybe extraction and all this and then consequently larger pools are like best positioned to do this well um we want to ask okay can we can we help these smaller stakers that we want to sort of support in this way and this is why i think we have the decisions made from fboost and like pbs broadly or for exactly this is like we want anyone to be able to have these mev opportunities access to them right regardless of the scale of their like staking operations we talked about this on the episode of dean and i think we talked about it on the previous episode which like this idea of accelerationism like here you're saying this is going to happen anyway

let's make sure it's not just the big players who have access to this thing does this still follow that philosophy would you say is that kind of what you're what you're angling for certainly yeah i mean accelerationism is a is a very interesting word but yeah uh you know i think there's certain things where it's not clear what the best options are like here's the thing like if we perfectly understood how to like solve mev at the core protocol layer like we would just like have a protocol hard fork that does this like we would just sort of ship and shine pbs there are a number of questions that i don't think we have answers to in part because i think we just need like more experience more data of just like observing the landscape it would be silly to you know

pick one particular version of this design and then what happens you know is no one uses it or like you know there's some like backdoor loophole that like sort of harms the integrity of like of what we're trying to accomplish so yeah i think we'll see and in the meantime yeah it's it's just sort of saying yeah what's the best we can do before we can answer those questions and that boost is like a great step in that direction hmm um i want to ask you about like sort of general opportunities once there is this move to proof of stake when it comes to mev i mean i think i've already sort of alluded to some of them where it's like validators running extra roles you've been alluded to it basically like new ways that they could improve what they're doing maybe even

like access some of these funds but i feel like i've heard and i don't know if this is actually something you're working on but this idea that like if you look at mev in a pos system if you start to incorporate some of this or enshrine it or like put it into protocol like could you actually democratize some of the mev or like give it out more to validators like in a more even way rather than having these sort of like unique prop shops who can invest all that time to like do a lot of this work that's gathering a lot of it is that actually something you're thinking about is that possible i've literally just like heard it i don't actually know if it's doable anything is possible

um okay you're touching on like a very big topic um i think the way that like the researchers in the space would refer to it as is it maybe smoothie so the idea is right there is mev like it may be exist and now the question is like what can we do and uh one thing we've kind of touched on is the fact that it provides these sort of you know economies of scale where if you're good at extracting a mev that's like some extra revenue you can use to improve your staking operation you then have these like large pools because obviously this compounds and then that harms decentralization so uh we want to ask okay as you know crypto economic researchers can we again mitigate that situation try to make sure it doesn't get there what can

we do um and an obvious sort of you know intuition is what you said anna is just okay if there is this mbv and like people can take it for themselves like is there a way we can almost like sort of you know smear it across everyone else the whole value set uh so that you then don't have this like at least as sharp of a return to scale on your efforts and yeah and this is kind of what i mean when i say there's a bunch of like open i think research questions around like how you'd actually want to do pbs in in the protocol um but yeah like at a high level the idea is you can imagine that you know if there's so much maybe in a block rather than that go directly to the builder or the proposer you know there'll be some split

between them but rather than i'll go to like just these singular actors you can again put it in the sort of protocol escrow or something um this is very much like if if people are familiar with 1559 the you know the transaction mechanics on ethereum today there's like this base fee that's burned and a way to think about that is like the protocol is taking the base fee and you know it turns around then and burns it but that's no choice there can be other choices and at least you know broadly speaking and so this is a similar thing where with mev smoothing you would have this ability to say okay rather than pay out that maybe directly the protocol takes it and then does something with it and you know there's a whole design space around what that something is uh but

yeah it's a very interesting question and i think people would like to see it come to the network at some point because yeah it does seem to reduce uh for example we've talked about reorgs and so like you can imagine that if you can reduce the like the burstiness of mev because the way to think about it is that like the movie is not smooth this is why we want to smooth it out like you know it could take until for example an oracle update on chain for there to suddenly be this huge liquidation opportunity and that could only happen you know once every say 100 blocks and what that means is that if you're extracting muv then like that on that 100 block you care very much about getting your transactions on chain right and so instead we could imagine smoothing this out

and making the whole process more democratic in that sense and by doing so you reduce you know the incentives to to for example try and reorg this liquidation out things like this i believe troon actually just had a paper on this i don't know if you want to plug that yeah yeah yeah for sure uh thanks um i guess in general it's very hard to design these things without this concept of like off-chain agreements of like why wouldn't people collude off chain to to avoid kind of the tax in some sense because you could view this redistribution as you know maybe if there's someone who's a searcher and also a proposer they may view that as an individual as a form of attacks but assuming you can find a way of doing

it so that will require cryptographic solutions as well as economic solutions it's not like a single it's not like obvious exactly what the best way of doing it is assuming you have that uh this paper just shows sort of this thing that like you can avoid these really bad equilibria where people just unstake all of their assets and go earn yield elsewhere um but also you can have a lower inflation rate and so you can you can actually have lower block rewards if you redistribute mev and so assuming there's like a sufficient quantity um and then yeah there's a way of quantifying that but that part was actually i think the more

surprising thing is that hey maybe this is an alternative to having a super super inflationary schedule to keep people shaking and so wow i think that that's part of the design space that i think will probably be explored but first we need to actually have like cryptographic solutions that you know will make it so that it's expensive enough for you to kind of cheat in these systems interesting which it's not right now at least is this something we want is a lower inflationary schedule like is that something that like one should aim for as a protocol designer have you ever seen the ultrasound money meme i feel like that's the entire thing is about doing that there's demand out there someone would

want this okay okay but even like you get like i don't know like turns point is i think good that like you can imagine mev as this like subsidy and i think this is like my own meme i want to start spreading is that like we should use mbv for public goods and this is exactly what we mean is that like if we can find a way to like you know have the perfect arrangement of signatures and hash functions and all these things like if we if we can use the tools we have available then like it's possible we can actually use any v for like very good things by having the protocol take it and then using it in like a positive way you still need to motivate people to run it though so i do think there needs to potentially be incentive at the level of the validator

and there and there can be and then the questions like okay if there's like this much mev then like half of it maybe goes to the protocol half i mean all these arguments are for 1559 and like this this works great right so the thing to keep in mind on this arc is that like many people who use these systems are interested in the long term game they're not just here to like sort of have this like one block profit and then completely exit and i think a lot of these things start making a lot more sense when you can say hey maybe you know block by block i'm not taking as much revenue however uh you know the system overall is much healthier much more secure and so it can keep going for longer cool one last thing i think is in general right in

almost all forms of this industry we've always generally seen pools of capital converge to the things that lower their variance and pay off per time like mining pools or staking derivatives and so it's it would be kind of surprising if mev is the only thing where people are not willing to trade off some instant reward for lower variance and rewards over the long term and so if there is a mechanism for it i do think there's demand for people doing that um this is actually a question so i chatted with james before this interview and asked if he had any follow-up questions and he asked like if the mev fee is actually sidestep one five five nine currently and so i wonder like

because what you've just described is like this of actually sharing the profits that's not going to happen at time of merge i'm assuming so in the meantime are the fees the mev fees actually like undoing what 1559 tried to do right i would say no but it's also not clear and this is part of the trickiness to pbs generally is that you can always sort of have these off-chain agreements uh i think turn just just mentioned this right and the idea is that basically you know you're right like maybe this does feel like a tax like why why would i use utility protocol like you know here's just liquidation we could have software that doesn't even touch you know the core protocol that facilitates all this automatically like you could do all this

and then the question's like yeah why would you use this um for 1559 in particular like it's mandated by the protocol that you must pay the base fee like the only way to get the mev is to like use block space and the only way to get block space is to like pay the base fee like that that's in part you know why there's this decision to burn the base fee because like it's there it is essentially just sort of like siphoned out of supply and like it's this very strong like forcing function that you know it's hard to like move around so yeah like to first order i would not say that like muv sidesteps this in any way and again this is where a lot of the complexities and subtleties around like this sort of the more open research questions of pbs is like we want the

same mechanism here where it's like there shouldn't be a way to sidestep the thing we do um and if there is it should be very expensive or just like not worth someone's time i want to move to the topic sort of of like ethereum versus other places i guess the question here really is like do you only work on ethereum do you work on i'm assuming all evm compatible chains are you only looking at the ethereum main chain as your focus point or like are you paying attention to the roll-ups to the sort of yeah bridged evm compatible chains curious what your thoughts are there i know that flashbots in general is

paying a lot of attention on other chains on l2s on rollups and so on in particular our research part of our organization we do also have a lot of collaborations with other projects happening on on the research side product wise we are flashbacks is mostly focused on ethereum for now okay but could one use it on any evm compatible network yes i mean not even only evm compatible like the mv boost system is potentially transferable to uh other setups as well okay but it would i guess it would have to follow the model that like the relayer like the builder you'd have to have some of that

infrastructure right for it to work yes right but that's that's independent of the evm i see yeah another way of thinking about it is like right now all this stuff is done off-chain anyway and you know like if you think about the current state of flashbacks it's just like completely an off-chain service right that does and this is just kind of making a more transparent version of that because none of these things are enshrined in consensus and you can't really unless you you know go to the complexity of trying to like really slow down the chain um i have a little follow-up to this which is like so when i did the last episode what i understood what actual technology was coming out it's like you'd be running like a guest

node and you'd get almost like a patch at least that's what alex at the time was describing this as um and so i'm wondering like do you still describe it that way would you still describe it as like it's a patch on existing client infrastructure no not anymore this changes from if you're involved ethereum two interference one it was a patch to gaf yeah that's called methgaf that provides another api to receive bundles and to merge them into the blocks in if2 it's a whole kind of a sidecar system where mafboost runs on the side of the proposer and the beacon node calls into mfboost and uses this whole of chain builder network to request blocks so it's more of like an add-on

sidecar add-on approach i would say got it i guess the follow-up to that is what percentage of the current network is actually using what you do have so this is before proof of stake like enters the fray but like do you know what percentage of the network is using it because as i understood it like the miners had to run this for it to kind of be useful and so yeah where where are you at so you mean now in ethereum one yes like seventy percent yeah i think in the ballpark of seventy percent yeah it's like 70 to 85 in that range um they did have one sort of vampire attack that sort of uh was unsuccessful since the last episode

i can't remember the name of that thing that did that that like they basically forked the mev gas and added a token and then it oh you know unsurprisingly like eden there we go right right attracted hash power for like a month and then have this like big collapse okay so that's 70 to 85 for this to function in the proof-of-stake world does it also have to have that kind of like network share for it to work and do it kind of expect that to inevitably happen with what you just described this sort of sidecar action the fact that like the validators need to be sent but like doing something in addition to just running the node software or the validator software well it's a good question my feeling is

that sticking pools will gravitate towards uh extracting mav as a form of higher rewards to their users as well i'm not sure how big the relay diversity will be so for sure not all the proposals will connect to the flashbox relays and proposes can connect to many relays at once or to a certain subset of those so if you're talking about the number of proposals that will connect to any really or tapping to any external builder network my personal feeling is that it will be the majority but it's very vague okay i really don't know something to check back in on right i think we'll see you know we'll know a lot more even in a month or two

and the theoretical argument is that people went to me v and you know with proof-of-stake ethereum this is definitely like the most straightforward way right now uh putting aside any sort of bespoke relationships you would have as like a large staking pool or some very specialized searcher or something like this got it i know you just mentioned that you're doing research into roll-up stuff but as i understand like right now there is no real mev to be had on rollups as they are because sequencers kind of do that would you agree with that do you feel like already today on the roll up front there's actually places where people can start building things or does there need to be some sort of decentralization of the sequencer community before that happens

i do not think that just having sequencers mitigates mav like there is still mav around for sure in fact a lot of the sequencer models have a separate relay function there might be a way in which you could have a single sequencer use a muv boost style network to do the relay to the main chain or a multi-relay so like let's suppose that there's two base chains that are both storing data for the same roll-up not not saying that this exists right now but you could imagine a world where like hey like a roll up is like we want redundancy or we want to like split our you know main data between two chains because we're willing to take that security

trade off you could imagine there is a real network for doing that um the question is like does it need to be an incentivized relay or network or not uh which that part gets a little more complicated for layer twos versus mev in the mav case there's just like clear revenue that can flow through to all the participants whereas in the later two case there's a lot more incentive to censor it's potentially a much higher set of valuable transactions before they go put in whereas in the med case you don't have that much time to reason about it also you're sort of like computationally bounded in terms of like production time but sorry these are just like kind of off-the-cuff guesses of this but i do

think like people will use these like relayer network type of things once they're like really hardened for other use cases other than mev like interesting and just a side note here the relay itself at least the honest relay is not a profitable endeavor really it's more of a public good so for instance the flashbox really itself it does not extract any value or provide any profit to those who run it it's really the block builders sharing their profit with the proposers where the proposals will receive the majority of the value of the mav but it really is mostly just neutral infrastructure and i guess this is why you're not sure how many would be running because there needs to be like there's no incentive so

it will be altruistic it's low incentive and it's high effort it's like a complicated piece of software it needs to do blog simulations to verify the submissions from the blog builders to make sure only proper blogs if the correct payments make it to the proposer because the proposer kind of blindly trusts what the relay is telling the value is and honest really needs to work very hard to make sure that everything is in order with the blocks it proposes to the proposal so i know that we've mentioned a few times this like cryptographic solution and i want to do a quick throwback to an episode tarot and i did with the crew from osmosis there they had made a proposal for using something like

threshold decryption which is a cryptographic solution to hide the order in the mempool thus like removing some sort of mev um is there a part of your team is this something you're looking at or working on is this something that you think yeah is relevant to this or is a potential solution it's certainly an area of collaboration and research okay i think it's not squarely inside the flashbots team to figure that out it's more of a broader collaborative effort to think through possible solutions of using threshold cryptography to solve some of the problems and i personally am not an expert in that but even then it there is still

certain open questions there is some still somebody who sees the transactions first and can act on that information there is still the block after and the person who has the first right to submit the next transactions so not all problems can be solved i think but i'm sure alex has more insight into the ongoing research on on using threshold encryption maybe some i don't know i'm not sure i think it's as great a mitigation at least some people might claim definitely i think it's like chris said there's this like you know broad collaborative effort across many different teams and organizations in the space broadly uh to figure out how we can use cryptography to you know

mitigate different externalities in v uh you know a lot of the pbs stuff i've kind of been gesturing at you know would have these economic incentives reinforced by cryptographic instructions to like you know bias the games we want versus like some other games and either way with threshold encryption in particular yeah i don't know i guess i'm personally not convinced because it's it's like chris was saying like what happens is if you have this construction and you're in your mev system then all it really does is push the mbv into like the boundaries of like the encryption process and this is like generally like this is why mev is like such a interesting and also like pervasive concept is like you can think of ways to like um squash it out over here but it's

going to pop up over there yes exactly like if you want to be academic about it we can say there's this like law of conservation of mev right that like mev is always there and you can't like you can't spend it well okay maybe you can bend it but you can't break it like you can't get rid of it it's just it'll be there you can move it around you can you can deploy some solution that pushes it to the edges of your solution but there's still the edges and like we live in an open world that's seemingly very complex there will always be an open boundary that we are dealing with and so in that sense there's always a maybe and the question is now okay yeah maybe there is some like radical cryptographic construction i think the more

uh let's say exotic ones i've heard are based on cryptography that's like very far away from being production ready um yeah there's things like homomorphic encryption like witness obfuscation and techniques like way beyond my understanding that like you know i've heard people throw these terms around um yeah so so we'll see i mean definitely like if there is you know i expect there to be ongoing progress in cryptography broadly and very much many other techniques will be applicable to the systems we're talking about today i'd just add one thing to alex's uh stuff which is basically this sort of idea that there's no way of removing mev i feel like somehow even though we're in 2022 it's

still controversial because people are still always trying to do it and then you know when they do it they don't realize they introduce them like centralized cudrill like you know in a lot of the fair ordering things they kind of implicitly assume some sort of fallback oracle fallback ordering person who's like effectively centralized and i think one important thing is that you know we still haven't actually figured out how to correctly define what a the concept of mev is other than in particular sub cases and b what the laws of transference are like given two different mechanisms for uh people to reveal their mev maybe one is you know right now right we have an

auction and so people bid on their bundles but you could imagine a world where it's a totally different type of thing and there's some calculation that tells you like you submit a bundle and then it waits for you know k different bundles and then the algorithm says like okay here's k prices you can either buy it now like ebay or not buy it which is a very different version than kind of like hey we have an auction where you have to compete to reveal your prices and the question is we don't even have the basic lingua fraca mathematically to compare what's the difference between me giving you prices versus you bidding in an auction for these types of things and until you have that you can't even really say like hey we're doing any reduction because we

haven't proven that the mechanism changing mechanisms has any economic impact we kind of are like oh this thing is just harder because you can't see the bundle right here at this point but that doesn't mean that there's not side channel information implicitly leaked from that at all and until we actually have some way of comparing mechanisms i generally think any claim that you have a clear reduction mechanism should be assumed to be false because it kind of assumes that the entire system is exactly the same like uh a mutatus muta i don't know my latin well enough to remember that the exact phrase like mutatus mutandi or something whatever like

stayed in the same place and so so at some level i think that's something you should always kind of keep in mind when evaluating these things is like sure maybe the threshold encryption does actually work on a single block before but the fact that you are still using an auction means that you've created some other inefficiency and maybe the posting prices thing is more efficient for threshold encryption versus an auction those types of basic things aren't even known i think like that these are the types of things that say it's like a quite large complicated system it's and it's very hard to just like switch one box with another and be like ah we solved it okay i now want to move on to the topic kind of of the day

the last few weeks there's been you know something kind of crazy happened in the zk space ofac an organization that i was not really aware of before this day has sanctioned a smart contract or collection of smart contracts in the form of tornado cash tornado being a mixer on ethereum based on zero knowledge proofs this came out while i was at z con in the middle of a bunch of zk researchers so that was a good moment for that to happen but i think like personally i've been digesting it over the last few weeks trying to like take in what people are saying but also kind of

hold steady until i can find out a little more or we know a little bit more but i know that it hit you guys so like the mev question and like what addresses are potentially blacklisted came up in your conversation so maybe you can share a little bit about what happened and how you've reacted i guess to this so uh flashbots infrastructure we have been complying with oh for one and a half years now already initially because we do have public uh unknown teammates living in the us and flashbacks has a u.s company and it would introduce huge liabilities to the team members to

not be compliant so this is not for us now a place to walk back from over compliance because the implications are severe if you're talking about 20 years trail time this is a not something that we can a risk we can put on team members and we can also not walk easily back what does it mean to follow ofac guidelines though like what does that actually mean literally yes it's kind of hard because there is no clear guidelines but at the very least there's a certain set of addresses where you cannot facilitate transactions this is my understanding this is some legal opinions we have received there is i think some unclarity how deep

it goes how deep you have to inspect transactions and what you can do what you cannot do so like ofac has sanctioned the contracts but in your case did the flashbots team take that to mean any address that has ever interacted with the flashbox contract would be on that blacklist no that's not the case what the flashbots projects did was most of our projects are open source and we added a pull request to add more addresses to the ofac blacklist in the public repositories that was already there yes and and this was in particular on the rpc endpoint and the community raised a counter pull request to remove all of the ofec

sensoring in this repository and bringing a lot of visibility into opex sensoring in general and then mixing this a little bit up with how meth boost is censoring uh automatically and by default and starting a broader debate with uh conflating certain projects but still talking about now the mergers in one month what does offic compliance mean for like ethereum in that time span yeah how are the addresses that were like added how are they actually decided on because you so you said it's not every address that ever interacted with the contract so what is it like where would that selection come from

i think it's just the addresses that the offwag puts out i'm not sure okay to me is now i'm on the first day after two weeks of vacations and i have i have been following the discussions around but uh i don't have the detailed knowledge where the specific number of addresses is coming from at least i can provide my understanding which is that uh there's a particular list put out by the treasury with ofac there's some acronym sdn but essentially this is what you referred to when they quote sanctioned smart contract is they added the address of this thing onto this list and uh to my knowledge again i i don't know all the details but what i believe is that flashbots has just taken this

list and just dropped it in as sort of like uh what we will not do is allow any transactions into our products that uh you know interact with anything on this list and again to my knowledge this doesn't mean anything that's interactive with those addresses right it's not this like transitive thing um okay i guess that is the question though that's where it becomes like how far away would that potentially expand the moment a government can define a transitive closure is the moment that i will say the education system actually worked for once why because like have you ever read any of these types of sanctioned documents on crypto stuff like the actual legal language

the way people define things suggests to me that they sometimes conflate a public key with a physical address and if you're already at that level of education i the idea that there's a transitive closure over the graph of all interactions of these addresses with each other seems like a big stretch for you know little lawyer and who works at you know the treasury department but we don't know until you know this has come to some sort of legal situation we don't know and that's why everyone is concerned and that's why there's been a lot of let's say drama over the last couple weeks is uh because then yeah like you do have to say okay um let's say we have you know people we care about like we have teammates who are in these jurisdictions then like

suddenly like we're going to comply like i don't i don't think it's that controversial to say like we're going to like you know avoid legal risk where possible and then the question is yeah how where does it end like what's the extent of this stuff and i think that's where it's just not clear yet um simply because there hasn't been information or you know in some cases we won't know until there's like regulations actually formed and that could take many years right so i do think if there anyone proposes something that's transitive in any sense like there will be lots of lawsuits because that that will be the thing that causes you know the like trial that goes to the supreme court because people will be like how many hops is too many hops and like it's it's just like you know there's no

way that doesn't end in just like legal warfare yeah i did notice like a lot of the feedback against it did come from folks that also don't live in the states i mean i i basically saw the the counter to the pull request and some of the conversation in there i mean there were some people who were really talking about like throwing it up in the air you know like we will not touch this if this continues you had a solution as far as i understood which is like releasing some sort of open source version or what was that exactly so the concern was that at the merge there might be only the flashbots really serving blocks and the flashbots really not including transactions that fall under the offec

sanction list and that could mean that assuming 80 percent of proposals use uh the flashbacks relay that eighty percent of the network will uh have some blocks with uh some sanctions um to put it in perspective though ethereum is surprisingly resilient in that way because even if 80 of the network uses a sensor ring really then a sensor transaction still gets seen on average every five blocks or after five blocks if there's 95 percent of the network using relays that comply with ophec it's one in 20 blocks our response to this crisis was that we released the relay source code that we are running on our testnet since some

time and developing the plan was to do that all along but this accelerated the timeline it's not not in a final state we wanted to get a little bit more final but it's an important conversation and discussion in this course and we believe that multiple relays is a step in the right direction and to facilitate that direction we provide a i would say a solid and somewhat tested base code for other groups to start really on their own and and to create more diversity and more competition i think obviously this topic is so much bigger than what we can get to and in this episode we don't have that much time left in the episode anyway so just to note for the listener i will be

doing an episode focused on tornado and and what's happened since then for the zk space so you can look out for that um like always i don't tend to do news on the show so i don't try to like jump right away to catch something i'd rather wait and see kind of be able to gather quite a bit of info figure out who i want to talk to and then we'll do an episode like that so yeah no stress alex chris i realized like you know i don't want to put too much on on the two of you to like answer it all today yeah so i guess like you know we went from sort of people spamming the blockchain in 2019 with pgas and probabilistic gas auctions to

kind of the orderly but off-chain sort of solutions of mev that sort of really rose in 2020 2021 and now we're kind of moving to this uh new world where most clients can be much more aware of mev and so i guess the real question is you know where do you see the next year or two and what are the kind of the innovations in both mev on the engineering side as well as on the sort of research side that you're most excited about or think will kind of like come to fruition um maybe let's start with chris i think like in general getting the infrastructure into a more stable states getting additional

capabilities into the speaker nodes perhaps for additional safety mechanisms moving more towards the peer-to-peer network and gossiping moving more towards a more trustless setup it's like vague high-level goals that work is going and progressing towards there's also a lot of ongoing research on pbs on single slot finality but this is all on a multi-year horizon so in the short term it's more the hardening additional security guarantees and the development of the honest relays that provide neutral infrastructure to connect proposers and

block builders and users and searches for me what about you alex yeah i mean i think that was a nice summary that chris gave so basically you know this mev boost represents a version of pbs and we generally want to build out this vision right so like we all have a shared sort of destination which is some enshrined pbs and how do we get there well we'd like there to be like a very healthy competitive market of all these different roles uh and you know with competition we'd hope to sort of reduce the externalities of these games generally so that's i think like uh you know sort of a sort of quote word map as to where we're heading and maybe taking another framing on it it's like i

would like to uh have people think about this as layers right so you know modular block chains is like this new hot thing so the reason why is because we can say okay like how are we going to actually scale these systems well it turns out if we like separate out their distinct functions into layers we can specialize the layers and then hopefully have everything work better together so i'd like to then say okay let's apply this thinking to like the mev world and i think what we'll see there is like similarly there'll be these like you know different chunks of functionality that specialize and become their own you know rabbit holes in their own way so something i'm very uh i'm very excited and looking forward to is like research around uh the layers of the stack closer to the user like we've we've talked a lot in

this episode about what's the protocol and how's the protocol related to this that maybe for consensus and things like this uh but we've almost you know we've talked very little about about the user like we mentioned threshold cryptography for example and it's applications and the reason we went to that is because you know the mev goes all the way up the stack to like the person actually making that transaction there is no movie unless there's a transaction right and so the question then is like okay like can we improve upon the status quo um and yeah certainly can there's actually i think a lot you can do yeah that's the whole episode in itself but a lot of very exciting research like you know so to give an example you could imagine that you know if i'm a user and i give you this next trade and

you back run me rather than the searcher taking all the value of the background they give me half or something like this right and then the question is okay like can we generalize this can this go across all sorts of like dfi applications different types of mev um you know can we generalize in the sense of like having everyone do this and yeah then you just there's like this whole world i think that we'll see in like a year or two and be like oh yeah like our thinking around this was like so sort of uh early then and now there's just like really interesting complex uh landscape out there new thing cool well i want to say thanks chris and alex for coming on the show and sharing with us kind of an update on mev what's new what you're thinking about um i do have one

last thing which is like i think this episode will air pre-merge what's your outlook what are you gonna be doing what are you gonna be thinking about what are you gonna be waiting for yeah this has been a long time coming uh i'm very excited i think at this point i'm you know cautiously optimistic that things will go very well it's something that we've generally been waiting for as a community for like quite a while right so it's it's definitely a huge milestone and uh yeah it's almost this thing where it's like i have some trouble staying past it because it's just like such a big thing that is about to happen um but yeah very very exciting time and yeah uh you know as we've laid out there's there's a ton of more

interesting you know uh questions in the mev space so it's not that there won't be a lack of things to do nice yeah i would second that it's not like we are now resting and relaxing and waiting for the merch but it's like still an ongoing big push on all fronts on multiple teams including research including the client teams and all the implementers builders relays so until the merge it's going to be an intense period and hopefully then a little bit of breathing room and then start the journeys to the next goals wild current date for the merge is september 15th which is by the way also the date of the zk summit eight um so it would be really cool if it happens on the same day i feel

i want to say thanks again to both you thanks to roone for coming back thanks for having me you know it's been a while but uh good to come back for a topic i've spent a lot of time thinking about cool thanks alex chris yeah thank you anna this has been great yeah thanks great uh talking with you all i want to say a big thank you to the zk podcast team that's tonya rachel henrik and david as our guest editor this time and to our listeners thanks for listening you