Date: Thur 1 Sept (after SBC 22)
Duration: 09:00 - 17:00
Co-organizers: Flashbots, Ethereum Foundation (support from SBC)
Venue: McCaw Hall (the main auditorium), Arrillaga Alumni Center (326 Galvez St)
Registration: Given the overwhelming interest for our MEV-sbc Workshop, SBC event organizers have kindly allowed us to reorder our venue, which will have sufficient capacity for all who are interested, whether you have applied in advance or not. Registration is no longer required.
Parking: Galvez Lot at Stanford University. Please pre-register using this link.
As a special thank you for all who have submitted an application in advance and have been accepted, you will be able to claim your MEV-sbc tshirt at the registration desk.
Livestream: https://livestream.com/accounts/1973198/mev-2022
Treasure map: For the curious (re)searchers, there is a secret portal that leads to our mevaverse.
MEV-sbc Workshop is focused on the post-MEV-Boost world and on the potential future where PBS (proposer-builder separation) is enshrined into the Ethereum protocol. It will cover research topics in that area and is intended for researchers to learn about the latest questions around MEV at the protocol level and to sync on the future topics we need to focus on collectively. The workshop is a satellite event of The Science of Blockchain Conference.
The agenda below is subject to change.
Section 0: MEV and proposer-builder separation (PBS)
09:00-09:30 A history of MEV and open research challenges (Phil Daian | Slides | Video)
09:30-10:30 Decentralizing the builder role (Vitalik Buterin | Slides | Video)
10:00-10:30 MEV-Boost, how does it work and what’s missing? (Alex Stokes | Slides | Video)
10:30-11:00Censorship Résistance and PBS (Justin Drake | Slides | Video)
- Format: 25min presentation, 5min Q&A
- Speaker: Justin Drake @EF (website | github | twitter)
- Tl;dr: Censorship resistance is one of the key properties Ethereum strives to maintain. How can out-of-protocol PBS be designed to uphold these properties while in-protocol PBS is developed?
11:00-12:00 Censorship resistance: bridging the gap (Phil Daian, Vitalik Buterin, Justin Drake, Francesco D’Amato, Zaki Manian | Video)
- Format: 55min debate, 5min Q&A
- Speaker: Vitalik Buterin, Phil Daian, Justin Drake, Zaki Manian, Francesco D’Amato
- Tl;dr: Unlike in-protocol PBS, MEV-Boost is designed with minimal changes to the core Ethereum protocol. What are the censorship risks of the current limited design? What are the short term improvements that can bridge the gap to in-protocol PBS?
12:00-12:45 lunch breakSection 1: Market dynamics in a PBS world
12:45-13:15 Modeling realised extractable value in proof-of-stake Ethereum (Elaine Hu | Slides | Video)
13:15-13:45 A formal model of post-MEV-Boost blockspace market dynamics (Tarun Chitra, Kshitij Kulkarni | Slides | Video)
- Format: 20min presentation, 5min Q&A
- Tl;dr: The implementation of MEV-Boost is the birth of a new kind of market and a fundamental change in how blocks are produced. What are the dynamics that may emerge? What are the centralisation risks?
13:45-14:15 Order flow, auctions and centralisation (Quintus Kilbourn | Slides | Video)
- Format: 20min presentation, 5min Q&A
- Speaker: Quintus Kilbourn @Flashbots (website | github | twitter)
- Tl;dr: Traditional markets are coloured by a controversial competition for exclusive access to users’ orders. Are we headed in the same direction and how can we avoid it?
14:15-14:45 Block-builder innovation post-merge (Alex Stokes | Slides | Video)
- Format: 20min presentation, 5min Q&A
- Tl;dr: After The Merge, MEV-Boost creates a permissionless market for block builders to exist and develop different edges and technologies. Some innovations already mentioned include distributed building, builders with specific policies such as receive-order fairness. and other building techniques. This talk explores the design space there and the open questions in it.
14:45-15:00 tea breakSection 2: Enhancements & Alternatives to PBS
15:00-15:30 Reducing trust assumptions in PBS using threshold decryption (Jannik Luhn | Slides | Video)
- Format: 20min presentation, 5min Q&A
- Speaker: Jannik Luhn @Shutter Network (website | github | twitter)
- Tl;dr: Threshold encryption is a powerful tool that can make certain participants in a system temporarily blind and thereby remove trust assumptions. We'd like to discuss a few approaches to how this can be applied in MEV-Boost and in-protocol PBS, in particular with regards to relayers and builders.
15:30-16:00 Censorship resistance via restaking (Sreeram Kannan | Slides | Video)
- Format: 20min presentation, 5min Q&A
- Tl;dr: Restaking, a new staking technique, promises to enable an opt-in PBS implementation with stronger trust assumptions, enforcement mechanisms and censorship resistance guarantees. How would this work, what are the benefits, challenges and open questions?
16:00-16:30 Ordering protocols (Mahimna Kelkar | Slides | Video)
- Format: 20min presentation, 5min Q&A
- Tl;dr: One question worth asking, and to continue to ask, is whether enshrining a proposer-builder separation is the best path forward as opposed to other solutions like adding additional slashing conditions in order to run a receive-order sequencing protocol on Ethereum. Are the visions of PBS & receive-order sequencing truly incompatible?
16:30-17:00 PBS and layer 2s (Xinyuan Sun | Slides | Video)
- Format: 20min presentation, 5min Q&A
- Speaker: Xinyuan Sun @Flashbots (website | github | twitter)
- Tl;dr: Assuming immense popularity of rollups, how will the PBS market on Ethereum interact with rollups while maintaining cross-domain stability? Can PBS fit into layer 2's sequencer decentralization scheme?
