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:

Sponsors:

Exodus: Exodus the easy-to-use crypto wallet available on all platforms and supporting over 100 different assets. - https://exodus.com/epicenter
ParaSwap: Give ParaSwap a try at https://paraswap.io/epicenter. This URL will allow you to claim a 50% refund on gas fees for your first swap of at least 1 Eth. This offer is available until May 1st 2021 and refunds will be made every Friday starting April 9th, 2021*Terms and conditions apply. -
Solana: Solana is the high performance blockchain supporting over 50k transactions per second to power the next generation of decentralized applications. - https://solana.com/epicenter

This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/389

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