Writings

An open and efficient block building ecosystem is essential to Ethereum. In order to catalyze further innovation and collaboration in block building, Flashbots has open sourced rbuilder, our latest and most performant block builder written in Rust, and designed to work with Reth.

We believe that sharing the responsibility and benefits of advancing block building creates a positive sum game for all Ethereum stakeholders. rbuilder is designed to be developed and stewarded by the community, and open sourcing it will accelerate this future.

We encourage developers to contribute to rbuilder, all teams to develop their builders in the open, and the community to only trust builders who follow the norms of transparency and free software.

The Dencun fork is a major Ethereum upgrade planned for over 2 years and recently went live on March 13 at epoch 29696. This upgrade introduces blob transactions, designed to reduce transaction costs for rollups. This post will detail Flashbots’ engineering work in preparation for the upgrade.

This post presents Sirrah, a minimalist demo of extending a blockchain with confidential computing using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). We'll cover the development end-to-end: starting from Gramine-SGX and ordinary REVM, and ending with MEV-aware auction application... and a timelock encryption demo that you can try right now.

We live in a world where decentralized finance ("defi") market structure and transaction execution is constantly changing, and poorly understood by most. Among this complexity, it is easy to forget that defi's market structure today is meaningfully different from the current state of traditional finance ("tradfi"). From the roots of a permissionless, global, decentralized genesis, defi is already well along the path to addressing a number of the criticisms levied at tradfi execution, by market participants and regulators alike.

Users should be able to see and control how their transactions are processed in the MEV supply chain. In order to bring more transparency to orderflow auctions, Flashbots has open sourced our implementation of a MEV-Share Node.

Transparency in the MEV supply chain is critical for parties that create orderflow (eg. users, wallets, and dapps) to make informed decisions. It also enables other actors like builders and searchers to better understand the guarantees and requirements of the systems they integrate.

We encourage all teams to develop their orderflow auctions in the open, and we advise the community to work with OFAs that follow the norms of free and open source software.

The Flashbots Node is one of several references and tools for MEV-Share that Flashbots has open sourced, including:

1. Protocol specifiction
2. Client library
3. Example bots

Join us in building a more decentralized and transparent MEV supply chain.

In this post, we preview the SUAVE Centauri release defined in the November 2022 roadmap in the Future of MEV. SUAVE Centauri consists of two parts: A privacy-aware orderflow auction (“OFA”), which we released with mev-share’s beta; and a SUAVE Devnet. This post aims to explain, at a high level, several key ideas that will help understand SUAVE and Flashbots more broadly. Moreover, we invite the community to experiment alongside us with the upcoming devnet launch detailed in the post.

Flashbots Research Proposals (FRP) is a grants program that Flashbots uses to fund community research, work with collaborators, and ensure that researchers beyond our internal team have the resources they need to illuminate the dark forest. While FRPs have existed since early Flashbots, our pace of grants-making accelerated in the past year. This post outlines our goals and methodology for FRP and highlights some cool projects this program made possible. Through FRP, we want to ensure that MEV is not only one of the most intellectually engaging areas to do research, but also one where passionate researchers can always find funding and support for their work. In the past year, FRP has made large strides in that direction, allowing Flashbots to support a range of external researchers including seasoned academics, ecosystem contributors, and new entrants to independent MEV research.

MEV-Share is a new paradigm for searchers. It unlocks new orderflow, features, and searching strategies. This short guide will get you up to speed on new ways of searching and explain how to upgrade your strategies to leverage MEV-Share.

We are excited to announce that Flashbots is successfully running a block builder inside an SGX enclave, a trusted execution environment (TEE) developed by Intel. The SGX block builder is now live on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet, and soon on mainnet!

Our previous work on running Geth inside SGX demonstrated the technical feasibility of this approach. Now, we’ve made the next step towards block building inside encrypted enclaves, and want to share our key learnings and challenges, as well as the all the code and tooling for running a block builder inside SGX.

This article examines the use of secure multi-party computation in allowing searchers to backrun users’ transactions while preserving transaction and search strategy confidentiality.