A Comprehensive Analysis of the Power Machine Behind Ethereum: MEV and PBS
It is hard to imagine how closed and dark the environment would be without the open-source contributions of participants from various fields and the openness of researchers from different institutions regarding MEV data.Author: Masterdai
Source: Hash Hunter
In 2007, a trader named Shengshan at the Royal Bank of Canada discovered something puzzling: the moment he pressed the buy button on his trading terminal, all his orders disappeared.
A similar incident occurred in the world of blockchain. In June 2022, Scott Bigelow deployed a crypto contract on the Ethereum mainnet and deposited 0.035 Ether into it, with only he knowing the password to withdraw the funds from the contract. However, the moment he sent the password to the contract, the Ether in the contract vanished.
Undoubtedly, they both encountered frontrunners. Shengshan's orders were distributed across various exchanges, and due to geographical reasons, there were slight time differences in when each order reached its respective exchange. High-frequency traders, using faster fiber-optic networks, were able to know about the first buy order ahead of time and bought up all the orders before Shengshan's orders could reach other exchanges.
Although Scott's password was known only to him, it was sniffed out by frontrunners in the memory pool before his transaction information was broadcast to various nodes, allowing them to copy his password and preemptively withdraw the funds from the contract with higher gas fees. These frontrunning bots are just the tip of the iceberg of these "predator" activities. Unlike traditional finance's high-frequency trading, the dark forest of blockchain, which lacks access mechanisms, has seen the emergence of more sophisticated and ruthless strategies, widely applied across DeFi and NFT sectors.
This article will showcase the roles of MEV bots and Flashbots from the perspective of Ethereum's underlying principles; the impact of the PBS architecture on the future crypto ecosystem and predictions for the evolution of various roles. It is divided into three chapters:
The first chapter is an interpretation of the principles.
The second chapter elaborates on the ecological landscape of MEV, investment, and entrepreneurial opportunities.
The third chapter predicts and looks forward to the future of the proposer-builder separation architecture.
1. Industry Chain
To fully understand the current PBS ecosystem (proposer-builder separation), we can view it from the user's perspective when initiating a transaction: "What exactly happens from the moment a user interacts with a decentralized application until it is fully established on the consensus layer?"
For ease of understanding, I have broken down these stages into several steps:
User Transaction: When we transfer funds in our wallet or exchange tokens on a decentralized exchange or mint an NFT, the on-chain data structure looks similar.
The above image shows the information required to mint an NFT contract, where the most important piece of information is the data. In the data, 0x1249c58b represents the call to the mint() function. If we replace the data with 0x, it signifies a regular transfer. Through this data and value, we can clearly determine the user's intent and purpose for the transaction.
Mempool: When users use public nodes to remotely call services (for example, Metamask defaults to using Infura's Ethereum node), the transaction enters the mempool. The mempool is a buffer zone where nodes receive transactions and include them in blocks, helping nodes check various transactions and determine the legality and validity of transaction outputs and signatures.
Transactions in the mempool differ for each node, but the data they contain is public across the entire blockchain network. In other words, anyone who can set up nodes on cloud servers worldwide can access most of the mempool data. The abuse of mempool data is extremely unfriendly to ordinary users. As illustrated in the earlier case, arbitrageurs can know the user's transaction intent in advance and profit from it. This profit-making process is referred to as MEV (Maximal Extractable Value).
Searcher: Also known as Ethereum bot operators, arbitrageurs and NFT minting bots can be categorized as searchers. Searchers are closely related to Flashbots; after Flashbots open-sourced their auction component, searchers can send bundles to concatenate their transactions or mempool transactions in order and specify a block builder to include these transactions in the block, thus avoiding their transactions being sniffed out in the public mempool.
Flashbots effectively created a new channel for transaction information, allowing some users to communicate directly with block builders. For example, in the following case, I used Flashbots to directly pass the mint transaction details to the block builder, thereby avoiding my mint information being known in advance.
Searchers also need to pay a certain price to make their bundles more attractive, such as increasing gas fees or directly transferring Ether to the builder's Coinbase address.
Through the bundling mechanism, searchers have the ability to change the order of transactions within a small scope. The mechanism also ensures that ordered transactions are unlikely to be interrupted. By arranging external transactions and their own contract-calling transactions, various attack strategies in the MEV domain can be formed, such as frontrunning, backrunning, sandwich attacks, JIT bots, time thief attacks, and uncle block thief attacks, etc.
a. Frontrunning: Profiting by preemptively copying an opponent's transaction strategy. For example, minting an NFT in front of ordinary users with higher gas fees, seizing the minting share from human users, etc.
b. Backrunning: Profiting by competing for the subsequent position of a transaction. Bots monitor certain tokens creating new trading pairs on Uniswap and create a large number of buy transactions after the pool is deployed. This strategy aims to be the first to purchase the token. Similarly, bots can monitor NFT project parties activating the mint() transaction to become the first to mint the NFT. Most existing NFT minting bots on the market follow this principle and architecture.
c. Sandwich Attack: When a user wants to swap for token A on a decentralized exchange, the bot can create two transactions and use the bundling feature to sandwich the victim's transaction. The bot's first transaction buys token A, the victim's transaction then pushes up the price of token A, and the third transaction sells the same amount of token A to profit. The profit depends on the slippage set by the victim's transaction.
d. JIT Bots (Just In Time): This model appears in Uniswap V3's token pools. Due to V3's concentrated liquidity feature, users can set up an LP within a very small range. When a user wants to conduct a large token transaction on V3, they immediately initiate a liquidity addition transaction and a liquidity destruction transaction, sandwiching the user's transaction to earn liquidity income from this transaction. This model requires JIT bots to calculate the position changes of the preceding and following transactions in advance, ensuring that the user's transaction falls precisely within their designed liquidity range.
Due to space limitations, I will not detail the specific attack methods and steps in this article. Interested readers can visit here (https://www.mev.wiki/attack-examples). Not all searchers are arbitrageurs. We can also use these mechanisms for good.
a. Transfer Service: Some hackers exploit NFTs in users' stolen wallets for phishing. Usually, the ETH in this wallet is insufficient to cover the gas fees for the transfer. When the victim tries to transfer in gas to proceed with the transfer, the hacker uses a script to take away the gas fees. We can use Flashbots to retrieve the NFTs from the stolen wallet before the hacker takes away the gas fees you transferred in.
Set up a transaction to transfer into the compromised wallet, then create a transaction to transfer out from the compromised wallet, placing these two transactions in a bundle and sending them to the block builder. Since these two transactions are consecutive in the block, the hacker cannot prevent you from transferring out the stolen NFT. When a searcher completes the construction of the bundle, they can send this bundle to their designated block builder.
Block Builder: Thanks to Flashbots open-sourcing the block building architecture in November 2022, we can understand the internal architecture design of block builders. A complete block building client consists of two different nodes: a geth execution layer node program for block building specifications and a modified prysm consensus layer node.
Block builders need to open an RPC endpoint so that searchers can send bundles to designated builders. The builder itself is divided into two modules: miner (geth) and builder (prysm). The miner module selects bundles that meet its program requirements and picks transactions from the mempool to fill into the created block through an algorithm.
The builder module continuously communicates with relayers and the miner module while generating block data, including the block's hash, recipient address, and additional information (usually the builder writes their name in it). It also sets up a transaction to send the entire block's revenue to the recipient address of the validating node.
Relayer: Block builders need a trusted third party to send the blocks they send to validators without leaking them. Similarly, validators also need a trusted relayer layer to help ensure the legality of the blocks. Of course, different relayers have their own characteristics; a validator can connect to multiple relayers through MEV-Boost to gain the maximum block selection rights.
From the architecture above, we can see that relayers also need to run consensus layer nodes and execution layer nodes to receive and send block information. The relayer has two external APIs connecting to block builders and MEV-Boost. This architecture maximizes the reduction of communication and trust costs between proposers and builders while ensuring that block information is not leaked.
Proposer: After Ethereum's merge, a new consensus layer was added to the network. The proposer architecture consists of four clients: execution layer node, consensus layer node, validator (32 ETH), and MEV-Boost. This is also the underlying architecture of most Ethereum node stakers. The original node stakers consisted of the first three software, and MEV-Boost can be understood as a plugin to coordinate communication between the two nodes and obtain additional block information from the relayer layer.
This architecture effectively separates the original proposer's ability to build blocks, allowing the proposer to simply propose blocks from MEV-Boost and add them to the beacon chain. Similarly, MEV-Boost can connect to multiple relayer layers, maximizing the proposer's interests. Ultimately, the profits generated by searchers and blocks are paid to the proposer, i.e., Ethereum stakers.
Transaction Chain:
When a user initiates a transaction, it first enters the public mempool. If this is a regular transaction, it will be included in the block created by the block builder after waiting for a while. If it is a transaction targeted by a searcher, it will enter the block in the form of a bundle. It then goes through the relayer layer and is ultimately signed and broadcast to the network by the block proposer. Users can also use private nodes from block builders to bypass the public mempool.
Profit Chain: Searchers look for transactions in the mempool that can capture profits, retrieve these transactions, and combine them with their own created transactions to place them in a bundle. The profits obtained by searchers go directly into their wallets, and to have this transaction included in a block by the block builder, searchers need to pay a fee to the block builder (through gas or Coinbase transfer).
a. Block Builder's Revenue = Transaction Fees (Gas) + Searcher Paid Fees - Destroyed Gas Fees
b. Block Builder's Profit = Transaction Fees (Gas) + Searcher Paid Fees - Destroyed Gas Fees - Block Builder's Fees to Validators (Costs)
c. MEV-Boost Revenue = Last Transfer in the Block = Block Builder's Fees to Validators (Costs)
Taking block 16489407 as an example, its overall block reward displayed on Etherscan is 0.129830707718222266 Ether, which is not its actual block building profit, but merely the transaction fees - destroyed gas fees. Records of coinbase.transfer can be queried from Flashbots' address, showing that searchers paid a total of 0.16601722521 Ether in fees.
Of course, this block actually contains 6 bundles, but the remaining 4 bundles are paid in gas fees. Due to space limitations, I will not elaborate further here; I will write a detailed article in the future on how to calculate the MEV revenue of a block.
In the last transfer of this block, the builder transferred 0.295569746890668 Ether to the validator.
Calculating gives:
Block Builder's Revenue = 0.129830707718222266 + 0.16601722521 = 0.29584793292 Ether
Block Builder's Profit = 0.29584793292 - 0.295569746890668 = 0.00027818602 Ether
From this, we can see that the block builder's profit is not as high as we might imagine; the majority of MEV profits still go to the node validators that have installed MEV-Boost. It is important to note that the revenue here does not include the staking revenue of the nodes. A node staker's revenue is divided into consensus layer revenue and MEV-Boost revenue.
MEV-Boost revenue is cash for validators; if a staker is lucky, they can receive ETH-settled revenue directly from the fee address after installing Boost. The consensus layer revenue has a payment period and can only be withdrawn after the Shanghai upgrade.
From the overall technical architecture and chain perspective, the current PBS architecture design is not simple. PBS itself is also a transition for Ethereum before the Scourge phase. The collusion between the relayer layer and the builder layer, as well as the centralization of block builders, currently lacks a complete solution. This is one of the main reasons Flashbots is launching Suave in the future.
2. Ecological Landscape and Investment Opportunities
The previous chapter categorized and organized the MEV chain through the implementation of the underlying architecture. In the ecosystem, project parties often occupy multiple fields and directions to achieve profits and creation. Of course, this field is still in a very early stage, and there are currently no clear business models or leading players in the race. To assess these early projects, I roughly divided them into several tracks (not involving node stakers) and evaluated them from three aspects: whether they can generate profits, whether they have the conditions for large-scale commercialization, and whether they are sustainable.
Searchers: Based on their functions and sources of profit, they can be divided into arbitrageurs, sandwich attackers, and liquidators. Their profit areas cover decentralized trading, lending, NFT trading, flash loans, etc. From the data provided by EigenPhi, it can be seen that the profit distribution among searchers is extremely unequal.
The vast majority of arbitrage profits are concentrated around $0.27, while only a very small number of arbitrage profits exceed $1000. At the same time, searchers also face the risk of being trapped by peers and being reverse arbitraged (salmonella tokens). Nathan Worsley mentioned in his speech at MEV Day: "This field requires top talent to work in teams; 20 small teams occupy the vast majority of the market share, and arbitrage strategies are becoming increasingly complex with fierce competition."
The intense competition among searchers largely stems from the openness and lack of access in blockchain networks. On one hand, they need better servers and faster information transmission channels to obtain the latest mempool data; on the other hand, they also need clever algorithms and strategies to ensure they can profit without being captured by others.
Undoubtedly, the searcher domain is a track that can generate profits and has sustainability, but this field does not have the potential for commercialization aimed at the general public; it is more like quantitative trading in the crypto space. For large investment institutions, investing in an on-chain quantitative trading team may not yield high returns. However, for small entrepreneurial teams and individuals familiar with quantitative trading and smart contract development, this could be a relatively good entry point into the crypto space. For example, establishing a crypto quantitative fund and promising xx% returns. Of course, this field is not static. The recent surge in trading volume of JIT bots can be observed.
With the increase in on-chain trading users and the emergence of various new DeFi protocols, there will be a large number of new profit opportunities in the future. This will test the execution capabilities of the team itself and their understanding of on-chain protocols.
Builders: According to current on-chain data, the builder market faces relatively intense competition. More and more node service providers are entering this market.
For example: BloXroute, Manifold, Blocknative, Beaverbuild, 0x69, Eden Network, Lightspeed, ETH-Builder, etc. The leftmost part of the image shows the block share of builders, the middle shows the share of relayers, and the right shows the share of validators. Flashbots is not the largest block builder but is currently the largest relayer service provider. I collected data from 600,000 blocks since the merge in December 2022.
Among them, the market share of the block builder 0x69 is gradually rising and is trending to surpass Flashbots. It should be noted that block share does not represent the profit of their blocks. The MEV income paid to validators is determined by block builders, meaning builders can quickly gain validators' favor through subsidies. These project parties also provide relayer services, with Flashbots being the largest market share holder among relayers. Currently, there is no data on relayers' profits. Ultrasound and Agnostic are the only two relayers that do not operate their own block building services.
In this field, BloXroute, Manifold, Blocknative, and Eden Network are among the few project parties that have publicly raised funds. Eden Network and Manifold only provide block building and relayer services, while BloXroute and Blocknative offer additional services alongside block building. BloXroute provides different relayer interfaces based on validators' needs, such as maximizing profit relayers and regular relayers. Functionally, BloXroute is closer to validator users and project parties, offering node protection services and faster transaction initiation services. Blocknative, on the other hand, is more oriented towards searchers and some DeFi project parties, providing mempool and transaction simulation services.
Market Size
We can estimate the market size by calculating the future block production volume. The current profit for each block built by existing builders is approximately 0.0005 Ether. Ethereum produces about 7000 blocks per day on average. Therefore, the overall block building profit for Ethereum in the future is around 1200 Ether, which is actually very low (the overall revenue of the execution layer is around 250,000 Ether). This is also why these project parties have other businesses to generate income.
Many factors influence block building profits, and current data may not represent the future. For example, block builders may actively reduce profits to seize market share, or insufficient trading volume may affect the number of bundles, etc. From the overall profit chain perspective, the revenue of block builders is more controllable. Their technical architecture also has the potential for large-scale deployment and operation. For project parties, additional paid services can be added on top of block building services, making block building and relayer services an attractive option for developers and protocol layer traffic (similar to how Web3 infrastructure provides free node calls).
SAAS Services: There are also some business models in the market that provide services to searchers and researchers, such as MEV data analysis provided by EigenPhi and the mempool data services mentioned above by Blocknative. Another type is faster private node calling services and node obfuscation services, allowing searchers to conduct node calls and communications discreetly and quickly.
Anti-MEV Services: Currently, there are also some decentralized exchanges that provide anti-frontrunning and sandwich attack services, such as private trading services offered by 1inch and cowswap. Their principle is similar to private RPC services, sending the user's transaction directly to the block builder, ensuring that this transaction does not go through the mempool.
Order Flow Feedback Services: This model is more common in traditional securities markets. Robinhood utilizes this service to generate profits when retail investors place orders through its software. Robinhood hands over these orders to market makers, who pay Robinhood cash when trading in the market. On-chain transactions can also follow this principle, such as the rook protocol. Users can place orders on rook's exclusive decentralized exchange, but this transaction will not be executed directly on-chain; instead, it is auctioned internally to rook's keepers.
Once the bidding is successful, the keeper has the authority to include the user's transaction in their bundle, allowing them to utilize the user's transaction for MEV activities and profit. After this transaction concludes, the user receives a portion of rook tokens from the auction, while the keeper gains the MEV profit. In this process, the keeper essentially acts as a searcher, but their order source is no longer the past mempool but rather the private dark pool established by the rook protocol. From a value distribution perspective, users can obtain a portion of MEV revenue while completing their orders.
Crypto Dark Pool Services: I have also conceived a business model where a new decentralized protocol can establish a dedicated block building layer and relayer layer while building trading services. All transactions generated by users using this protocol will enter this dark pool. Searchers will need to pay fees to gain exclusive order flow for arbitrage. The protocol layer can then return the fees paid by searchers to users, such as airdrops and gas-free services, to attract more users to engage in dark pool trading.
a. Example: A wallet provider can set up a dedicated dark pool node, ensuring that all transfers and transactions using that wallet are executed through this dark pool: User A swaps token A for token B on Sushiswap; User B swaps token B for token A on Uniswap. The moment these two orders combine, it will cause an imbalance in the a-b trading exchange rate between Uni and Sushi.
Arbitrageurs can auction these two orders and bundle their arbitrage strategies to achieve flash loan arbitrage, etc. Of course, these two transactions must reach a certain scale to achieve exchange imbalances between different pools. Only when the transaction scale reaches a certain level can it be realized, for example, market makers auctioning 20 user orders to complete a massive arbitrage. Of course, this model also carries significant risks, such as users' transaction losses and excessive centralization of block builders.
SUAVE: By establishing an independent mempool and block construction network, all future order flows and blocks can be publicly bid on and accessed by searchers and validators, spanning multi-chain architectures.
Currently, the architectural design of SUAVE is still in the discussion phase. I believe SUAVE is very likely to launch its dedicated node client. If it continues to use the existing PBS design, it will need to add communication with L2 nodes on top of the current architecture. This means verifying transaction messages by deploying multiple chain nodes, which is overly cumbersome and complex. It would be better to develop a lightweight node client compatible with all EVM ecosystems to achieve the modular functions described in its documentation.
From the perspective of overall profit distribution, the majority of MEV profits currently go to searchers and node validators. Users are often victims rather than beneficiaries. From an investment perspective, anti-MEV and order flow trading are likely to be relatively reliable and high-certainty business models in the future. On one hand, they can attract more ordinary users to participate by utilizing the profits captured from MEV; on the other hand, they can allow searchers to join in amplifying the value of order flows.
Undoubtedly, Flashbots is the leading player in this field, with most of the architectural designs and code being open-sourced by them, leading the direction of the entire industry. I believe the opportunities in this field do not lie in arbitrage and staking but in who can possess the ability to build blocks and allocate transactions.
The value of this ability lies not in the economic layer but in the power layer of the entire Ethereum ecosystem—whoever controls the ordering of transactions within blocks holds the power of distribution, and whoever holds the power of distribution can reshape the overall network's value distribution. In the past, the value of user token circulation was distributed through smart contracts and individual transactions, while in the future, value will be distributed through block builders who combine these order flows. In other words, we will transition from an era of competing for individual transaction values to an era of competing for block space resources.
3. Outlook and Concerns for the Future
In the era of classical physics, people's understanding of things was continuous. When we walk from point A to point B, we must experience countless intermediate moments; time is continuous, and the change in distance is also continuous. It wasn't until Planck proposed the hypothesis of energy being discontinuous and divisible in his 1901 paper "On the Normal Distribution of Energy in the Spectrum" that the iceberg of quantum mechanics was unveiled.
Many users find it difficult to understand MEV because, from a human perspective, we believe that the order we send out can be executed simultaneously in chronological order, which is continuous. From the perspective of the block network, the user's intent and actions are arranged in a series of indivisible orders, which is discontinuous.
Searchers can capture a transaction after a user sends it and reorder it to gain profits. On a macro level, we can approximate that searchers, through bundles, achieve the ability to manipulate time within a small scope. To give an inappropriate example, from the user's perspective, their transaction being sandwich attacked is akin to being preemptively frontrun by searchers from both the future and the past. The cases discussed in this article all occur on the Ethereum chain, but one thing I can be sure of is that as long as the orders contained within blocks remain non-continuous and indivisible, MEV will inevitably occur.
Centralization Trends:
The power of block building will have far-reaching implications for future protocol layers. As stated in "1984": "Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past." From January 3 to 27, over 80% of blocks were created by just 5 block builders.
It is worth mentioning that there is a special feature in block building clients where builders can set up blacklists to exclude certain addresses from being included in the block. This means that in the future, builders will have the ability to censor transactions. When certain users initiate transactions that do not meet their criteria, those transactions will remain in a pending state and will never reach the real network.
The Tornado-Cash incident is an example of node-level censorship initiated by major node service providers, while builders initiate mempool-level censorship. Of course, as more users and project parties participate, the decentralization of block building in the future will dilute the impact of this censorship. However, the potential dangers brought by the centralization of block building should not be underestimated. I have conceived several possibilities for readers' reference.
Enforcement Blocks: Suppose that in the future, most builders and node service providers are controlled by a single entity; we will officially enter a blockchain network manipulated by entity laws. Here, all transactions (smart contracts, transfers, authorizations, interactions) will be subject to multiple reviews and approvals. Node callers will audit the wallet addresses and IPs of transaction initiators, and once confirmed, the initiated transaction will enter a monitored non-public mempool. Searchers will assume the enforcement function to determine the legality of the transaction content.
Transactions will be graded and labeled based on their content and information, then included in bundles and sent to different builders. Builders can place different levels of transactions into blocks with different priorities based on transaction types and functions, which will then be broadcasted for validators to review. Some transactions that do not comply with entity rules will be discarded in the mempool, preventing any searchers or builders from retrieving them until the user cancels them. In this scenario, hacking and theft activities will be minimized, but users will lose maximum access to the blockchain network, stifling innovation and expression of information.
Corporate Blocks: Suppose that in the future, builders and node providers are monopolized by a few corporate giants; we will enter a zero-sum game era for block resources. Users and developers may gain relative freedom but will be constrained by multiple giant protocols, unable to flexibly choose transaction counterparts. Even users' order flows may be auctioned in dark pools at marked prices, leading to exploitation and utilization. We will face the most malicious commercial competition, such as builders selling censorship and construction rights for profit. Certain protocols can buy out competitors' order flows, causing delays and disruptions in their users' transactions.
For example, when a user buys or sells on an NFT exchange, if their order is placed at the end of the block by the opposing party, the opposing party's user can preemptively purchase the NFT, causing the original user's transaction to fail. DEX protocols can also reach agreements with builders to place all opposing transactions into one block, causing temporary token pool imbalances that invalidate the opposing users' transactions. In this scenario, commercial activities still exist, but users and developers must choose sides according to the rules, stifling commercial innovation.
Tampering with History: In cases where builders and nodes are overly centralized, proof-of-stake chains can delete unwanted blocks from the past through reorganization attacks. Proof-of-work chains can alter timelines through time thief attacks to re-mine blocks.
In this scenario, the power machine has the ability to change the past, effectively deleting history that is unfavorable to them.
Disrupting Reality: Current blockchain network transactions focus on transfers, contract deployments, and token trading, without having a real impact on the real world. Suppose a product emerges in the future that integrates IoT devices with blockchain networks; then, order manipulation could interfere with the parameter settings of certain devices in the real world, affecting people's lives. A similar incident has already occurred in the traditional cybersecurity industry: the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident in May 2021 indirectly led to jet fuel shortages for several airlines in North America.
Illuminating the Dark Forest
The above cases are extreme scenarios that may occur. The subsequent launch of the SUAVE architecture and the influx of participants will mitigate the impact of private order flow abuse and builder centralization. The premise here is sufficient free market competition and protection for innovators. It is hard to imagine how closed and dark the environment would be without the contributions of participants from various fields to open-source code and researchers' openness to MEV data. The continuous contributions of developers and researchers to code and data have allowed us to see a glimmer of hope in this dark forest.
A Truly Open and Fair MEV Market: Allowing all searchers and builders to participate, users can freely choose the direction of their transactions. Searchers and builders can compete fully and maximize their returns to protocol layer users. Meanwhile, the protocol can utilize order flows to achieve efficiency and maximize the use of block resources.
Perhaps the centralization of the crypto world is inevitable, just as the open ideals of the early internet are in stark contrast to its current closed state. But this does not mean we can deny the pursuit and longing for a decentralized network in the future. Historical development is a spiral ascent; it is the continuous innovation and trial-and-error of past pioneers that brings experience and lessons to future generations. As Nietzsche said: "He sinks, he falls." You mock him repeatedly, but know that he falls above you. He rejoices in despair, yet his bright light follows your darkness.
A fair market competition environment is the soil for nurturing innovation, while a more effective profit distribution mechanism and decentralized architecture are the cornerstones for achieving this. The technology of searchers and block builders is neutral; its impact on the environment depends on how people use it. In other words, whoever controls the present simultaneously controls the future and the past. The conditions for illuminating the dark forest depend not only on capital but also on the plans; the decision-making power lies in the hands of everyone in the present.
References:
MEV-Boost Architecture Preview
The Problem of Over-Centralization Caused by MEV
Coinbase Announces Adoption of MEV-Boost as Its Staking Node Component
Simulated Frontrunning Experiment
EigenPhi's Report on MEV Impact on Uniswap
Discussion on PBS Architecture
Open-Source Block Builder Architecture
Detailed Video on Reorganization Attacks
