Research Articles

Introduction Relays in MEV-Boost are doubly-trusted stakeholders within the existing PBS landscape and yet they are not properly incentivized. People have discussed and are concerned over many ways in which validators and builders game the current system, such as slot proposal delay for timing games and colocation for latency optimization, all to maximize their MEV […]

Opening remark On September 26th, 2023, Blocknative announced its decision to halt its block building and relay operations. When I heard the news ahead of the announcement, I was surprised. Even though I was well aware that companies that were operating the relays for PBS were bleeding cash, I did not expect anyone to actually […]

Key takeaways: · NFT financialization is still in the early stages, with peer-to-peer borrowing/lending appearing to be the best solution at present. · Oracle-based financialization platforms, including peer-to-pool lending and derivatives, find challenges to solve the issue of NFT floor price manipulation, which hinders business expansion. · The future trend of the NFT industry towards […]

Introduction Over the past few months, some crypto chads have openly discussed the meaning behind “trust-minimization”, a term that was slapped onto almost all of the new and flashy middleware/infra that comes with optimistic or ZKP for security. And the discussions around security assumptions behind trust-minimized bridges have spurred further discourse to reach a consensus […]

Key Takeaways: LVR is important because 1) it disincentivizes AMM LPs from providing liquidity to the pool, and 2) it leads to the centralization of block building because searcher-builders who are performing CEX-DEX arbitrages can generate far more valuable blocks than neutral builders due to their exclusive orderflow. There are broadly two design philosophies to […]