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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• Exodus: Exodus the easy-to-use crypto wallet available on all platforms and supporting over 100 different assets. - https://exodus.com/epicenter
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• 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