Research
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to P2P Overlays in Ethereum
The p2p topology of the beacon network is uncommon knowledge. In this post we dissect its underlying components and review some of the subtleties and optimizations at play. Using this knowledge we go through specifics to the beacon chains instantiation.
Fair Distribution of Economic Opportunities in OFAs
In OFAs such as mev-share, wallet-boost, Rook, and more, events are sent to searchers which represent economic opportunities in the form of information needed to extract MEV. When trying to design an information sharing protocol to optimize for some notion of “fairness”, i.e. access to events is indepdent of resources, it seems likely that you end up stuck between a rock and a hard place, that is between needing a delay function like construction (PoW) or needing a blockchain on top of your blockchain.
4337 mev supply chain
Once widely adopted, ERC4337 will create alternate “user operation” mempools, fragmenting public sources of MEV opportunities. OFAs will also most likely provide support for user operations. 2 new actors are added to the supply chain, “bundlers” and “paymasters”, both of which have functionality that may be subsumed by searchers, builders, and OFAs.