Mitigation of timing games was heavily discussed during the MEV-Boost community call this past week. Here I provide a summary and my thoughts, as well as a full transcript of the call. The transcript was auto-generated by YouTube, cleaned by ChatGPT, and then enriched with speaker information and verified for accuracy by us. These calls are fantast

This essay was originally published on September 29, 2023 on Substack. Ethereum developers are often accused of changing the rules by which the game is played. For the class of people who view a blockchain’s spec as infallible, this is a valid criticism, but it is also true that rules do not define how a game is played—they define how a game can

The year is 1999, you show up at school and all the other kids are circled around your best friend. He's playing Pokemon Red, battling the Elite Four with a level-99 Charizard. You want to be cool; you want to be him. Even though you think Pokemon is a dumb grind, you finally cave in and buy a cartridge. You go with Pokemon Blue to differentiate yo

All blockchains can become practically stalled when blockspace demand is extreme. The most prominent example of this is the Otherdeed NFT mint on Ethereum, where gas prices skyrocketed and all non-related transactions became economically unfeasible until the mint was complete four hours later. When all the transactions are small, this is a feature

As is tradition in the Ethereum community, people have been throwing out basically random numbers about the sell pressure from partial withdrawals. The big factor that many people are missing in their analysis is the difference between validators who set 0x01 credentials, and those who did not. The Withdrawals FAQ dives into the difference, but the

This article was originally published on Substack, April 13, 2022. It is released here under the notion that all Ethereum protocol research should be free and accessible. January 2023 Update: The original piece was written during the height of the Celsius recursive stETH trade and paints a more bearish picture than I think is now justified (six-mo