Why Encrypt the Mempool Only Now?

Transcript

Yeah, thank you guys for coming and speaking today. I'm Fry and I've been going to these events for a while and before I ask my question, just wanted to say I'm primarily an Ethereum maximalist even though I've messed around on other chains for the most part I always come back to Ethereum. Can't really give up on it. So if my question seems a bit harsh, I just wanted to start by framing that in this way so you wouldn't think I was just being an Ethereum hater. Uh with the future bringing potential existential threats to blockchain, we're starting to see serious media outlets come out and say things like quantum computing, AI could break blockchain and all these different types of existential threats.

To me it feels like the ability to solve problems, especially simple ones like this that have taxed users nearly two billion dollars during the lifetime of Ethereum, it seems like being able to solve those problems is particularly important. So my question is why has it taken so long for this solution to be implemented and it seems like it's just such a great fix to something that's been taxing users for such a long time. Um, I think very good question. Yeah, I think it's Um, and I think there's many reasons and maybe we're overstating a little how simple it is. Yeah, so I think there it

um it it does require relatively extensive protocol changes for for this to to work. Um uh, to both the consensus and the and the execution client. Um, and and also I would say one I would say one big criticism people definitely can have is that the none of the encryption technologies is is perfect in this regard. Yeah, so the threshold encryption you have this trust assumption where you still need to trust that X amount X percentage of the nodes are are honest. Um T is as Laura said we have this hardware trust something so you need to trust of like Intel or or whatever

if they don't have a backdoor and then also you have this hardware requirement on nodes that would have then have to run this specialized hardware that has this TE or SGX or compatibility. So I think that's that's a valid criticism and where maybe some people would say let's wait a little longer even to for us to have the perfect matured cryptography so that it's like kind of like fully end-to-end safe and and and and yeah. Um but yeah I think the reasons are kind of like coordination, awareness, um maybe one maybe one thing that has slowed it down is actually private mempools, right? Because because the the without private mempools the the

problem would be a lot more obvious and people would get front run left and right yeah. So you'd see the graph and the front running is going down. So people would say great let's well we solved front running, right? So that's a little bit of a misconception I would say because again we solved front running by by by introducing strong trust assumptions and maybe even introducing a censorship factor, right? Because now you have these these private mempools where they they can not just front run but they could also now censor your transactions. So I would say private mempools might even have slowed down this track.

But yeah the general answer different factors complexity um awareness uh yeah. But yeah great question.