Relay Compliance and Efficacy

[randomishwalk]

@sambacha

These sorts of guarantees w.r.t. SGX are hard to make without the proper focus, and from our perspective Intel does not care that much about the problems SGX tries to address.

Thoughts on AWS Nitro? I know it’s still basically the same trust assumption (trust your OEM with the setup) but I have not seen a comparison of side channel exploits and benchmarking of past known incidents b/w SGX vs. Nitro.

@sambacha

Interestingly, (this) shows that only Flashbots is fully OFAC compliant before Nov 8th, 2022. While the other three relays, bloXroute (Regulated), Blocknative, and Eden, who claim to be OFAC compliant, still proposed blocks containing sanctioned transactions. On Nov 8th, 2022, OFAC updated the sanctions list, but all of the OFAC-compliant relays failed to promptly adapt to the new list

This is fascinating data. Do all the other censoring relay operators basically following the same blacklist as the FB relay? Specifically ofac_blacklist.json from the FB block validation repo. Interesting also there’s an open PR to update it dating back to…11/4/22

@sambacha

Flashbots is much more open than other private pools, but does not seem to be an optimal solution in illuminating MEV behavior.

What are the other big private mempools out there aside from Flashbots? I thought Blocknative and Bloxroute were both relatively quite small? Are you aware of any of the big validator pools (CEX or decentralized) operating these “dark pools”? Perhaps maybe also a consortium of the big crypto MMs (the ones that are still left standing anyway)?

@sambacha

Again, there is no clear answer to whether MEV is democratized, so we stick to the same refrain: more than before, but less than it could be.

Is it clear though that Flashbots enabled incremental MEV extraction or simply organized activity that otherwise would have occurred anyway in a (trusted) somewhat orderly marketplace? I don’t think it’s actually very clear if there’s a causal relationship there to be fair to Flashbots…

@sambacha

On this point, we note that after an initially steep climb in usage, Flashbots has seen a decline in the number of blocks published (see Figure 3)

They have been actively helping new, independent relays (iirc both the Gnosis DAO one and ultrasound.money) bootstrap activity by forwarding blocks to them. Or are you saying even when accounting for that, their share has been going down? Isn’t it reasonable that their market share would go down given they were effectively at 90-100% of the MEV market (though I suppose you could measure it a number of ways, internal builders vs. their relay)?