Turning an EIP Into a Rallying Point for the Ecosystem

Transcript

Great. Hey, good morning everyone. How's everyone doing today? Yeah, all right. So anyways, I'm Anthony Carollo. I'm from the Shutter Network. Um you probably have heard about us if you ever uh use snapshot for uh going and voting on dials. Um and we're heavily involved with encrypted mem pools if you've uh been involved with that space. Anyways, uh for today's presentation, going to share um a little bit of an ongoing case study on our efforts to go and encrypt a mem pool on Ethereum and sharing some thoughts about how we can go about it.

Uh but first before we begin, I just want to get a show of hands. Who's worked on something that you thought was obviously important, but whenever you go and launch it, you find crickets. You find a lot of people not really seeing uh what you're wanting to do. Yeah, of course. So that's also what this conversation is about today. It's the effort about how to get people to care about something that you know is important, but it's easier said than done. Uh so again, this is an ongoing case study. This is not very finessed. It's a little bit messy, but it's showing an overview of our thinking behind that and using as a case study. I'm also a marketer. I'm not a developer, so I'm going to be sharing things from a very

uh high-level layman's point of view, not going to the nitty-gritty technical part of it. So, as we went and we started launching this encrypted mem pool EIP, um my perception and maybe some others was it's about putting the best best solution together, right? And sharing in front of the core developers and getting nods and everyone agreeing that yeah, we need this for the Ethereum protocol. But that's actually not the case. It's actually more complex than that. Um it's actually about Oh, it kind of slowed kind of slowed down right now.

Anyways, it's about getting consensus across a large group of people. Um and there's a lot of people that you need to uh convince of the priority of this. Um and it's easier said than done on that. Um so you have to go and reach out to a lot of number of people um to share what it's about and you need to get them prioritize it over other initiatives as well. Um so for this, for doing an encrypted mem pool, we had to go and do a bunch of segmenting and research on these different audiences. So, going and looking at the supporters and we need to get them to not just support it. We need them to be vocal about it. Then you need to go and reach out to people that that

are on the fence and don't really know too much about it and you need to go and answer their questions, find out what are their problem, and try to support them as well. Then the last one and the more difficult is the detractors. And these are the folks that are completely against the EIP, the initiative, and may never be for it. And to find these guys, it's it's a little bit tricky. Sometimes it's as easy as just following the money and understanding um who are the people that are obviously against the initiative.

Um but sometimes it's not as transparent as well because sometimes the people that um are against it might not tell you um front front facing. They might just work in the background to try to prevent something like that from happening. No. Next slide. Oh, was this clicker? Oh. Okay, I got another clicker. Um so it's about going and reaching out to them to try to mitigate that challenge as well.

So, how do you get a detractor to go and deprioritize their own interest to focus on the greater Ethereum ecosystem? Or how do you raise enough um awareness and enough people that believe in this that they're they become the minority and they have to agree with it, otherwise they're the odd man out. So, let's start from the beginning of this story, um the bare bolts of what we're looking to do. So, um I know there's a lot of people uh developers, different people from different backgrounds in the view, but um we're going to talk about the public mem pool. So, the public mem pool when setting up Ethereum, which was meant to be transparent and verifiable, um is the main

um waiting area for transactions as it moves out of the transaction supply chain. Now, this is the the default place where transactions go um as they're going um and going through the transaction supply chain. Now, this is a a great uh public infrastructure, but that comes with a a major flaw, which is it's transparent. And obviously that's a good thing, but there is a problem with it in that there are bots that go and monitor this and look for transactions to reorder um for profit. And so there's good things that happen with this such as good MEV, but there's also bad MEV, also known as toxic MEV, front running and sandwich attacks.

And so this has happened since 20 since 2020, about 1.8 billion has been extracted from the Ethereum uh ecosystem. Um part of it good MEV, part of it bad bad MEV. But it shows a bit of a problem here. And at the same time, it does more than just cause uh toxic MEV. It also delays transactions in the form of real-time censorship. So, to combat that, um a number of different projects have come together and put together a a proposed put together a solution called private mem pools. And so this is uh a measure that goes and allows people to bypass the public mem pool and go to private infrastructure that protects people

against these attacks. And it actually has worked quite well. I mean, it's really reduced the amount of MEV attacks on the Ethereum ecosystem. Um it's been great, but also it's kind of created a little bit of awkwardness um in that every a lot of a lot of the traffic has gone from the public infrastructure to private infrastructure. And within this, it has led to some centralization and uh because Ethereum was meant to be um the trustless and decentralized, um it's moved to a point where you also have to trust a small group of people to make certain that it's uh carried um and your transaction is treated in the right

way and that it's not leaked and then it's not front run themselves. Um so that's caused a little bit of a problem. So, this has been working for quite a while, but it's not the only solution out there, which leads us to encrypted mem pools, um which is a more uh decentralized uh way of providing this protection against malicious MEV, um but also protection for uh censorship. Um and so um and then greater greater guarantees against uh front running and sandwich attacks. So, but the question is what the is an encrypted mem pool, which I want to go into. So, uh for the people that are unfamiliar, say we go and we launch an encrypted mem

pool, it's connected to your wallet. You go send an encrypted transaction, instead of going to a private mem pool, it goes to a public mem pool, but it is encrypted. During this period, your transaction is encrypted on it goes in the public mem pool. People can see the transaction, but they can't see the contents inside of it. So, the important data within it is hidden. Um and it's not just hidden from a few, it's hidden from literally everyone um that provides the greater in greater protection uh guarantees on that. Then once um it's done and confirmed on the block, then it's decrypted. Um sorry, and then is once it's finalized and and been ordered, it is confirmed on the block

and uh decrypted as well. Now, there are more nuances, there more uh details that I could go into, um which we could share a little bit later, but just wanted to give a baseline understanding of it. >> [snorts] >> And within this, there's a lot of different benefits within it. So again, I I won't go into full details on this, but uh a front running sandwich sandwich attack uh protection, uh protection against uh censorship, um which helps us um and works very it works very well with fossil and EPBS, um which we like to to call completing the holy trinity of censorship resistance on Ethereum.

By doing this, it also brings the order flow back to the public mem pool, um thus ending the partial monopoly that we have on private mem pools, um giving people another option for going and uh sending their transaction, and by there reducing builder censorship and increasing trust within institutionals and from there creating fair markets and greater maximum liquidity. So, Shutter Network, um the team I'm with has been working on encrypted mem pools for quite a while.

Um we have um a live implementation on Gnosis chain since 2024. We've done beacon chain research. Um we've gone and done test nets. Um we've been at this for a long time. And one thing we've been pushing for a while is we've been wanting to get this on the Ethereum road map. Now, we've been in conversations with a number of people for a while for this and the the reception of we get this is it's it's good, but it's been kind of mixed um in that it's nice to have and it is important, but it's not the priority. So, it got kind of frustrating to a point where we went and we launched an EIP ourselves. Uh EIP A105 back in December 2020 2025.

Um and starting out was a bit slow. We did get some interest and it was exciting. Um and then from there, um after a a weeks, we were met with a lot of positive reception in the form other people going and launching their own EIPs and proposals for encrypted mempools. So, it started a little bit of a a cascade of more projects going and more groups proposing. So, shortly after the Lucid EIP was proposed, um which was um uh proposed with some folks from EF um and other groups as well. And then from there uh encrypted frame transaction was proposed as well. And we're quite excited about this um

seeing more people going and proposing more encrypted mempools because we did not want to be the only ones focused on this. We wanted to it's it's a larger group focusing on this. Um so, it was actually a surprise to see that um the Lucid encrypted mempool EIP folks uh saw us launch our EIP and uh it put a little bit of fire under their belly to go and uh put theirs on there, although they'd been thinking about it for a while. And then from there, um EMs also got put on the straw man roadmap for Ethereum for I-star, which also helped build momentum.

And then from there, it actually grew into something a little bit even better. We've decided to form uh form a coalition with the folks that were working on Lucid EIP. Um so, instead of multiple teams with their own initiatives, we started working together on that, which was uh quite powerful way of doing it. And now, while there were different perceptions and we all didn't believe we all didn't agree on every aspect of it, we believe that we needed an encrypted mempool on Ethereum, so we came together and we with the belief that we would go work out some of the details later on, which we're working on at the moment.

So, just want to give a quick overview of some of the learning points that we have on this. Um So, um from here, what went well on the initiative that we were doing? So, one is at the very beginning we put together a hit list of all the people we needed to reach out to for pushing this EIP. We identified our allies, looked at the neutral parties and detractors, and then we went out and started doing our outreach. Um from there, we chose we decided that we were going to focus on action more than overthinking, so we're very quick and very agile with our things as well. Uh big thing was also combining forces instead of competing. Um Uh another big one was com com segmenting. We knew that we were working with core devs and we

needed to be more complex and more careful with the way we communicated, but at the same time if we're on X, we needed to focus on simplicity for the rest. So, I think that segmenting was very useful as well. And then from there, I think going and having these prior case studies and implementations on Gnosis chain was also very powerful. So, what we've learned I think is very useful for those that are putting their own EIP or doing any other marketing initiative within this space. So, one is core devs are absolutely brilliant. They're working on a lot of things, but they're they're a bit overworked and they can't adequately assess some of these things. So, it's making certain that when you go and you put together EIP, you put it together very neatly, make it easily digestible, and you're there to answer questions and

support them. The other one is you need a strong champion for any EIP that you put together. Um I'm was very impressed with the uh champion for uh frame transactions. Um it was a get developer from uh called light client. Um He single-handedly helped push the frame transactions through um the EIP process for Hegoda. Um and although it wasn't uh selected as a headliner, it's considered uh for inclusion for Hegoda, and I think he was one of the strong proponents that kept it moving. Um it's also good to have case studies and simulations ready for your EIP if you were to go in that

space, so that was something we could have done better on. And getting feedback from the Ethereum client teams earlier also would have been more important. Before I go into the open discussion, um just want to quickly show what's next on this. Um so, now that we've gone and we reached a stage, we're going and pushing for encrypted mempools on I-star. And so, what's next is we're going and getting feedback, making improvements. We've already got feedback from people so far, and we're doing that. We're looking into developing some live implementations um on uh with Aragon on Ethereum, and we're looking to do an out-of-protocol one with Prime Ev. Um and then we're looking to develop a number of different

initiatives such as a transaction simulator and expanding outreach and building a larger coalition. So, with that said, for those that are looking to get involved with encrypted mempools in this initiative to push on Ethereum, there's a couple of ways to get involved. Um Um so, we have an EIP EM structure working group um that's already been set up by Justin Florentine that meets weekly. Um the next one is going to be Yeah, sorry, these are older slides. Um so, on the 15th of April. So, you can sign up and come join this, but we also have a biz coms marking group as well for those that we need to go reach out

the wallets, we need to reach out to do more market research, partnerships, and you can get involved as well. That one's actually going to be on the 8th for next week. So, you can use this form to just give your contact details, and then we can follow up with you as well. Um so, I just want to open the floor for Do we have a few minutes for questions? Um if you have any questions about the EIP process, encrypted mempools, uh happy to answer. We also have some of our developer team as well as where as well here. Uh question over there. Uh hi. Do you think like a a modified version of Fossil that maybe lets like the validator

committee communicate like a directed acyclic graph of transactions in the mempool could get like a lot of the effect of encrypted mempool, but like be kind of more along the lines of Fossil? Like Do you think there's a way to do that? That's probably a good question for our developer on our team. Um Hold that question for a second. Um I can get probably Yiannis to answer that in a second, but does anyone else have any other questions as well, non-technical? Otherwise, I can pass it to Yiannis to help answer. Sorry, can you pass the mic to him?

We don't have a lot of time, but 1 minute maybe. Maybe one question. Thank you. Um Yeah and Um it's probably better if we talk afterwards because I didn't fully understand the question. Um in general, I think it's difficult to merge like different views on on ordering and find like a a compromise in a way that's uh unbiasable. Um so, I'm a little bit skep- skeptical that it works differently, but maybe.

Cool. Any additional questions? Maybe one for room for one more? Okay, cool. So, anyways, uh encrypted mempool, we're pushing for this. It's going to go in on I-star. Um we need to raise more awareness and for So, if you guys see this um on X, you see people going and promoting this, um get involved. We want to make this work because we want to make Ethereum um the best platform for trading. We want to have one that's uh um safe platform for trading and open for all.

So, thank you so much for joining today. Uh we have some buttons in the back for everyone. Thank you. >> [applause]