MEV Roast 14 Agenda - Scaling Ethereum Edition

[CarboClanC]

Date: Thursday, May 6
Time: 11:30am ET / 8:30am PT / 3:30pm UTC / 11:30pm China Standard Time
Roast Master: Justin Drake

MEV Roast is a monthly tradition from the MEV Pi-rate Ship, a neutral, chain-agnostic, interdisciplinary research collective that supports MEV-related theoretical and empirical research.

Slides | Watch Stream | Subscribe to Flashbots Calendar

Part 0: Introduction & Memes (10min)

• MEV Roast: Scaling Ethereum Edition (Introduction)

Part 1. MEV and ETH2 (65min)
Each Roast we will invite MEV Ship research collective members to present insights from MEV-related research they are working on or interesting early stage proposals for community feedback.

• MEV is Fundamental to Permissionless Systems

  • Navigator: Phil Daian (Slides | Post)

• MEV and ETH2

  • Navigator: Alex Obadia (Slides)

• MEV and Scaling Ethereum

  • Panelists: Vitalik Buterin, Phil Daian, Justin Drake

Part 2: MEV on Rollups and Beyond (75min)

• MEV Minimization on L2: solution space & design contraints

  • Navigator: Eli Ben-Sasson (Slides)

• From MEV Auction (MEVA) to Sequencer MEV Extraction

  • Navigator: Karl Floersch (Slides | Post)

• Defining the MEV Game on L2

  • Navigator: Georgios Konstantopoulos (Slides)

• The MEV game on L2: bots, users, sequencers dynamics

  • Georgios Konstantopoulos, Barry Whitehat, Stani Kulechov, David Goldberg (Synthetix: MEV Notes | Highlight )
  • Panel Questions:
    • What kinds of MEV do major DeFi platforms expose today?
    • Most Rollup L2s promise instant transaction confirmation by having the sequencer commit on including transactions on a first come first serve basis. Does this affect your user base?
    • What countermeasures have Aave and Synthetix introduced, or are thinking to introduce in order to reduce their MEV surface?
    • How would you compare the MEV exposed by an Optimistic Rollup protocol, vs an ZK rollup protocol. Do fraud proofs have any fatal weakness in your opinion?
    • When evaluating an L2 protocol to use, do you take its MEV mitigation measures into account?

Extra Credit: Roast Questions from the Roast Master:
😊 The questions below have purposefully abrasive language to fit the "roast" theme. 😊

• Why does the Flashbots definition of MEV not include all extractable value such as native EVM fees? It's confusing and wrong—please fix.
• Can we stop celebrating the gas savings from off chain PGAs? Those gas savings are minimal, <1% of gas usage. (Source: MEV-Explore v0)
• Can we please stop propagating the misconception that the MEV power hierarchy ends with all-powerful block builders? This is FUD. The power hierarchy is user < bot < block builder < dApp < VM. We primarily need to focus on better dApp designs as well as VM-level MEV minimisation and extraction such as EIP-1559.
• Can Flashbots leadership tone down concave thinking such as "MEV is fundamental" and "fairness is impossible". We only need good-enough fairness and good-enough MEV minimisation.
• Can the centralisation risks that stem from Flashbots block proposer whitelisting in the context of Eth2 be properly acknowledged and taken more seriously?
• Flashbots REV only provides a 5.2% increase in miner revenue. Do you find these REV numbers compelling enough to justify the huge Flashbots effort?
• Can flashbots.net be friendlier to non-devs as opposed to a redirect to a Github repo?

More Resources:
Past MEV Roasts recaps | MEV Research Vault | MEV-Explore v0