Flashbots: The Good, Bad and the Ugly of MEV
Flashbots is a research and development company focussed on Miner Extractable Value (MEV). MEV is the profit a miner can make through their ability to arbitrarily include, exclude, or re-order transactions from the blocks they produce. Flashbots has created a fork of the ethereum geth client, MEV-geth, to allow miners to exploit MEV, currently run by 80% of miners.
Co-founders of Flashbots, Stephane Gosselin and Phil Daian, recently joined us to chat about the protocol and to deep dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of MEV.
Topics:
- Stephane and Phil's backgrounds and how they got into crypto
- What led them to creating Flashbots and what it does
- What is Miner/Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)
- A technical deep dive into how the project works with miners and searchers
- The progress on the SGX solution
- Spam attacks and reorgs on Flashbots
- Phil's reply to the perspective that MEV extraction is theft
- What is Generalized Frontrunning?
- How MEV differs at L1 vs L2
- What's the plan for Flashbots going forward?
Links:
Hosts:Friederike Ernst, Sunny Aggarwal