Epicenter brings you in-depth conversations about the technical, economic and social implications of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies. Every week, we interview business leaders, engineers academics and entrepreneurs, and bring you a diverse spectrum of opinions and points of view. Epicenter is hosted by Sebastien Couture, Brian Fabian Crain, Friederike Ernst, Meher Roy and Felix Lutsch. Since 2014, our episodes have been downloaded over 8 million times.
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episode 389: Phil Daian & Stephane Gosselin: Flashbots – The Good, Bad and the Ugly of MEV
Flashbots is a research and development company focussed on Miner Extractable Value (MEV). MEV is the profit a miner can make through their ability to arbitrarily include, exclude, or re-order transactions from the blocks they produce. Flashbots has created a fork of the ethereum geth client, MEV-geth, to allow miners to exploit MEV, currently run by 80% of miners.
Co-founders of Flashbots, Stephane Gosselin and Phil Daian, recently joined us to chat about the protocol and to deep dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly of MEV.
Topics covered in this episode:
- Stephane and Phil's backgrounds and how they got into crypto
- What led them to creating Flashbots and what it does
- What is Miner/Maximal Extractable Value (MEV)
- A technical deep dive into how the project works with miners and searchers
- The progress on the SGX solution
- Spam attacks and reorgs on Flashbots
- Phil's reply to the perspective that MEV extraction is theft
- What is Generalized Frontrunning?
- How MEV differs at L1 vs L2
- What's the plan for Flashbots going forward?
Episode links:
- Flashbots on GitHub
- Flashbots on Medium
- MEV...what do?
- Stephane on Twitter
- Phil on Twitter
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This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/389