- The speaker discusses the complexity and sophistication that users are expected to have in the MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) space.
- They introduce Metamask Portfolio, a tool that allows users to manage their crypto assets across different networks in one place.
- The video then transitions to an interview with Matt Cutler, the CEO of BlockNative.
- Matt explains the MEV Boost supply chain in Ethereum's proof of stake world and the role of BlockNative in it.
- He discusses the switch from proof of work to proof of stake and the introduction of Proposer Builder Separation (PBS).
- PBS allows the outsourcing of block building to third-party specialists, resulting in more valuable blocks.
- MEV Boost, developed by the Flashbots team, is a sidecar that facilitates the supply chain of MEV on Ethereum.
- The supply chain involves user transactions, searchers (traders who run bots to extract value), block builders, and relays.
- BlockNative has been involved in the Ethereum ecosystem for over 5 years and evolved into a block builder and relay operator.
- However, they recently suspended these operations and are now focused on providing observability and protection for users and wallets.
- They aim to level the playing field and make the network more equitable for regular users.
- The speaker mentions the challenges of being a credibly neutral provider and the economic viability of participating in the ecosystem.

- The concept of MEV (Miner Extractable Value) involves extracting value from controlling inclusion/exclusion ordering in transactions.
- In the past, proof of work systems led to priority gas auctions where bots bid up gas prices to control ordering, resulting in high fees for regular users.
- MEV has now been moved off-chain into an auction system where traders bid for the attention of builders to capture profits.
- However, in reality, the value is concentrated at the trader and validator levels, with little margin for builders.
- Searchers and builders often become vertically integrated to maximize profits and avoid sharing transactions.
- Relays, critical for network operations, have no economic incentive and face risks without rewards.
- Private order flow is becoming more prevalent, with transactions not appearing in the public mempool, leading to concerns about adverse settlement and increased slippage.

- Private transactions may have worse settlement due to increased slippage and trade-offs need to be considered.
- Proprietary order flow allows certain builders to have exclusive rights to trade or build blocks, which can lead to negative consequences for decentralization.
- The Ethereum network is trying to address these issues through protocol changes, such as enshrining PBS and creating a bid pool.
- Relays are still necessary in an ePBS world, but there are concerns about missed slots and trade-offs.
- The concept of MEV burn is being explored, but there are questions and uncertainties surrounding it.
- The number of participants and their incentives play a significant role in controlling the network.

- MEV (Miner Extractable Value) is a fact of life in ordered transaction systems like Ethereum
- Most wallets are not MEV aware and users are expected to understand and navigate MEV themselves
- MEV exists in various domains like SEO, ticket sales, and stock trades
- MEV burn is a proposal to reduce the impact of MEV by burning it and distributing benefits to all ETH holders
- Implementing MEV burn could significantly reduce yield on staked ETH and may create network fragmentation
- MEV already affects the monetary properties of ETH, but proposals like MEV burn aim to address it more intentionally
- The small number of builders and relays in Ethereum leads to centralization concerns
- The current state of affairs is reactive to rent-seeking behavior, with all the economics going to traders rather than infrastructure providers.

- The lack of economics in the infrastructure and software layer of Ethereum leads to all the profits going to traders.
- Trading on Ethereum requires specialized skills and significant capital, resulting in a small number of actors receiving the majority of profits.
- To create a more balanced and decentralized network, explicit economic incentives are needed to encourage participation and diversity.
- The Ethereum ecosystem is seen as the proving ground for building foundations for the next economy, despite other options being available.
- MEV (Miner Extractable Value) is a fact of life in any blockchain system and will also emerge on Layer 2 solutions.
- MEV-aware infrastructure is needed to level the playing field and reduce information asymmetries.
- BlockNative is actively working to solve these issues and provide improved tooling for users.
- More information about BlockNative can be found on their website and social media platforms.

- BlockNative offers a transaction boost for private transactions with great observability and no compromise.
- Web3 Onboard is recommended for builders looking to connect wallets.
- BlockNative works with major wallets and supports other builders.
- The goal is to up-level the ecosystem and balance things out for users and LP providers.

- The speaker discusses the complexity of the MEV space and introduces Metamask Portfolio, a tool for managing crypto assets across different networks.
- The CEO of BlockNative explains the MEV Boost supply chain in Ethereum's proof of stake world and the role of BlockNative in it.
- The switch from proof of work to proof of stake and the introduction of Proposer Builder Separation (PBS) are discussed.
- MEV Boost facilitates the supply chain of MEV on Ethereum, involving user transactions, searchers, block builders, and relays.
- BlockNative has suspended block building and relay operations to focus on observability and protection for users and wallets.
- The challenges of being a neutral provider and the economic viability of participating in the ecosystem are mentioned.
- MEV involves extracting value from controlling transaction ordering and has been moved off-chain into an auction system.
- Private order flow and proprietary order flow have implications for settlement and decentralization.
- The Ethereum network is addressing these issues through protocol changes and exploring the concept of MEV burn.
- The number of participants and their incentives play a significant role in controlling the network.
- MEV exists in various domains and implementing MEV burn could reduce yield on staked ETH.
- The lack of economics in the infrastructure and software layer of Ethereum leads to all profits going to traders.
- To create a more balanced and decentralized network, explicit economic incentives are needed.
- MEV is a fact of life in any blockchain system and MEV-aware infrastructure is needed to level the playing field.
- BlockNative is actively working to solve these issues and offers improved tooling for users.

In this week's bonus interview, we are joined by Blocknative CEO and Co-founder Matt Cutler to dive into the world of MEV and order flow on Ethereum. They explore how the proof-of-stake transition has impacted block building, the economics and incentives faced by builders and relays, and the prevalence of private order flow. Matt shares his thoughts on protocol changes like MEV-Geth and burning and how to make order flow more equitable for users. Looking ahead, he discusses how L2 scaling could reshape MEV dynamics and why Blocknative remains committed to improving Ethereum despite its flaws. 

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Try MetaMask Portfolio at https://blckwrks.co/MetaMask0xResearch
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Timestamps

0:00 Introduction
1:44 MEVBoost Supply Chain & Blocknatives Role
9:58 Economic Incentives in MEV
17:36 Hexens Ad
18:40 Prevalence of Private Order Flow
29:00 Metamask Ad
29:44 MEV Burn Impact
41:36 Why Build in Ethereum?
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Resource

Blocknative Docs
https://docs.blocknative.com/ 
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Check out Blockworks Research today! Research, data, governance, tokenomics, and models – now, all in one place

Blockworks Research: https://www.blockworksresearch.com/
Free Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter
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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 0xResearch is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Dan, Sam, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Imagine you go to the grocery store and you go, oh, can't pay for your groceries at the Visa card on a Wednesday night if you have milk in your basket.

Like, that's just a really not a great settlement that if you're going to shop on a Wednesday night, you got to use American Express or MasterCard.

You're like, but no, I just want to buy my groceries.

Like, no, you got to pay attention to day of week, time of day.

What the boxes and like what the last 3 digits of your card are.

But that's the state of users in MEV today.

There's all this crazy sophistication that users are expected to have.

Like us managing your portfolio across different chains, wallets, LP positions, perps positions.

I'm excited to tell you about Metamask Portfolio, which lets you manage all of your crypto assets across different networks while it's all in 1 place.

Do more with Web3, your way with Metamask portfolio.

You'll hear a little bit more about it later in the show.

Welcome back to another episode of ZeroX Research.

We have an awesome interview lined up today with Matt Cutler, the CEO of BlockNative.

But prior to that, I want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor, Hexens, 1 of the most hardcore security teams in web 3 pioneering and ZK and novel cryptography.

Hexen is trusted by tier 1 projects like Polygon, including the work on their new ZK EVM, Mantle, Risk 0, Lido, Oneinch, NewBank, and more.

You will hear about them a little bit later in the show.

So I think just to set the stage for the listener, can you kind of go into the MevBoost supply chain and Ethereum in the proof of stake world and kind of the role that BlockNative has played in that up to date?

There's a lot happening here and our role within it is changing.

So about almost exactly a year ago on September 15th, 2022, Ethereum went through the merge.

It was the biggest upgrade to the network in its history.

And it switched from being a proof of work consensus mechanism where basically computer solves arbitrary math problems to win the right to write a block to proof of stake, where instead of solving math problems, you basically stake ether.

And if you play by the rules and do what the network expects, you get a little return.

And if you play games or try to break the rules, you get slashed.

This had many positive effects on the network, including massively increasing its economic security.

But there were other changes that got made to the network at the same time to counteract other concerns.

And 1 of the big upgrades was what was known as PBS or Proposer builder separation.

So at any given time, there needs to be an entity, a member of the network, which is the tip of the chain, which has the right to build the block, to basically say, this is the block that's going to become the new tip of the chain.

It's going to include the following transactions in the following order.

Under proof of work, there was a competitive math game where you had to throw compute and power into that to sort of try to arbitrarily solve this, it was randomized in this way.

Under proof of stake, it's more like someone gets nominated.

So today there are, I don't know, 700, 800,000, maybe 900,000 validators on the network.

1 of them gets selected to be the tip of the chain.

What PBS does is it says, well, you can outsource that you have the option as the proposer as the tip of the chain to either build your own block or to outsource it to a set of third party specialists.

And it turns out that in today's Ethereum, somewhere between 93 and 95% of all blocks are outsourced to this third party network.

And the reason for that is, turns out building valuable blocks is hard.

That you need a lot of networking, you need a lot of compute, you need a lot of storage, you need a lot of relationships with entities that are going to basically pay for specific preference and ordering.

And so it turns out that an outsource block is about on average anywhere from 3 to 5 times as valuable as an internally built block.

And so as a validator who gets nominated, you can either do all this work yourself to get a low value block, or you can just outsource it and get a high value block.

And this is achieved via a sidecar known as MEV Boost, or MEV Boost, which was developed by the Flashbots team.

And so it's not technically part of the Ethereum protocol, but for all intents and purposes, it is part of the Ethereum protocol because 95% of the blocks depend on it.

So this creates a MEV Boost creates a supply chain where you have user transactions that are in the public mempool.

You use your MetaMask or Ledger or other wallet to submit.

You have searchers, which are more easily thought of as traders who run bots that basically watch those transactions going by.

And if they see the opportunity to extract value by ordering things in a certain way or issuing response transactions, what they'll actually do is they grab those transactions out of the public Mempool, bundle them with response transactions, either before or after or on top of or something else.

And then they ascribe a bid price where they send it to these entities called block builders and say, if you include this bundle of transactions, you get it on chain in this order, here's what I'll pay, right?

And so now you have this notion of MEV or maximal extractable value that gets expressed in the block building network.

The block builders try to build the most valuable blocks.

They have relationships with MEV searchers.

They have access to the public mempool, they might have their own transactions, and we can talk a little bit about how these things get smushed together.

And then the builders compete with each other to have the most valuable block as selected by the proposer or the validator.

And there's this intermediary group called relays that basically protect builders from validators and protect validators from builders.

And again, the relay network manages about 95% of all blocks, but there's no economics there.

And through this sort of intricate network or supply chain, your transactions go from being candidates for inclusion to getting included.

There's a lot of consequences to how this works.

There's a lot of interesting exploits and attacks that have happened this way.

And there's a lot of value that gets moved around by this whole supply chain.

And that's how blocks are built today on Ethereum is via this network.

So anyways, long answer to a short question.

But that's a quick reader's digest view of what's going on out there today.

Before we dive much further into that process that you just laid out, that was awesome, by the way.

But can you just explain exactly what it is that Blocknative maybe did over the past year and how the business is evolving as you figure out where you fit in the stack?

So we've been building on Ethereum for more than 5 years.

And we build 1 of the most popular wallet Connection libraries called Web3 Onboard.

So we provide APIs for mempool access, we provide notification for mempool changes, and we provide mempool explorer functionality so people can get access to it.

When the merge happened, or as the merge was coming up, and PBS was being introduced, we realized we had a lot of expertise to participate in all of this, that we have global infrastructure, we have low latency networks, we have a lot of relationships with interesting folks, And we decided to sort of evolve the business into being a block builder and a relay operator.

So at the merge, we joined into this and we were participants in this ecosystem.

But last week, we actually announced the suspension of those operations, that we are no longer operating our relay and we're no longer building blocks because it wasn't economically viable for us to do so as a credibly neutral provider, and we can talk about what that means.

We are increasingly focused more narrowly on helping users and wallets have observability into what's going on so they have understanding of why things settle the way that they do, and then protection so that you can protect your transactions from adverse settlement.

1 of the consequences of how things work today is traders sort of have the most valuable transactions, they have the highest bids, and so the best settlement is at the top of the block, and that's exclusively the domain of large traders, right?

But as a consequence of that, regular users basically can't compete for top of block.

So the me's and you's of the world actually have to settle for middle block or bottom of block, which means less favorable settlement.

And so it creates kind of this 2 lane system, this sort of have and have nots.

And we don't really like that about sort of how the network is evolving this way.

And so rather than participating and maybe even contributing to that 2 lane situation, we're trying to take all of our expertise and knowledge and relationships and try to level the playing field a little bit to make it more equitable on behalf of users and the wallets that they do.

So that's what we're focusing on today, but we're in the middle of that transition as we try to find interesting business opportunities.

And I love your ethos driven view of what, how the ecosystem has evolved and should evolve and where you kind of fit in in that in that world.

So you mentioned 2 interesting things there.

1 was the how do you be like neutral in this activity and participate, you know, especially from like US soil or soil where there may not be some regulatory clarity around how you can interact in this in a legal manner.

And the second 1 was the economic incentives.

So can you talk maybe first about the incentive side of things?

Like where is the economic incentive, at least to participate in this?

Because you see a lot of vertical integration with builder searchers or builder relays.

And can you just talk a bit about how that dynamic shapes and then we can talk about the second piece later.

But the idea is there is this intrinsic value known as MEV which is the value that can be extracted from controlling inclusion exclusion ordering.

And I always, the example I always give is like an Oracle update.

So Chainlink has an Oracle update that basically shows the price of ETH is collapsing.

As a result of that, there's a whole bunch of collateralized debt positions on Maker and Aave and elsewhere that become available for liquidation, right?

And let's, in the key, in the arbitrary case, let's say it's $100,000 of liquidation.

But probably only 1 actor is going to get it.

And whoever gets it is the 1 who gets their transaction immediately behind that Oracle update because before the Oracle update happens, they're not available for liquidation.

As soon as the Oracle update happens, it's available And the only way to guarantee that you capture the $100,000 profit is to basically slide your transaction immediately behind it.

So this is known as controlling ordering.

Now in the old days under proof of work, what would usually ensue was known as a priority gas auction, where 2 or more than 2 bots would go to war and bid up the gas price in order to try to get specific ordering.

And then everybody would suffer as a result.

So the me's and you's of the world would pay these exorbitantly high gas prices by this happenstance that has nothing to do with the NFT we want to buy.

It's just 2 bots over here going to war and we suffer as a result.

Basically this all got moved off chain into an off chain auction with the idea being that these traders, again, They're called searchers, but I always find searcher to be sort of a funny term because it feels like it's a person who's searching through stuff and they're not.

They're trader-like entities who run software to do this all automatically.

And what they do is they bid for the attention of the builders, right?

To say, well, to make $100,000, I'll bid 10 bucks.

But Dan says he'll bid 20 bucks and Sam says he'll bid 50 bucks.

And as you might imagine, we go around and we bid up the price of that inclusion to pretty quickly reflect the market of, well, if there's $100,000 of profit, we're probably going to bid pretty close to that.

And then the builder then passes that along.

And so the idea is the economics are that there is margin that can be extracted at each step, right?

That the searchers are going to basically bid in such a way that they still are profitable.

And then the builders are going to bid in such a way that they're profitable, right?

And that there's all this, you know, there's this very healthy network of independent actors, each of whom gets a slice and each of whom are economically incentivized.

Turns out that's not how it works at all.

Turns out that in production, what actually happens is The value is at the trader level at 1 end and at the validator level at the other end because the traders are the ones who basically figure out where there's profit and then eventually they just have to pay most of their profit to the validator.

And so we were a credibly neutral builder.

What does credibly neutral mean in this case?

It means we don't operate our own trading bots.

We're taking commodity data, which is public mempool data.

So everybody else had access to the same stuff.

We have a bunch of relationships with these searchers, but so does everybody else.

They're the same bundles as everybody else.

And we try to put them together in ways that are different than everybody else.

But it turns out that this is a pretty efficient process and that most everyone puts things together in about the same way, with about the same value.

And so there's not a lot of margin to be extracted there.

The other thing is searchers are like, there's a lot of money to be had in the trading side of things.

And why do we roll the dice with the builder who may or may not get our stuff on chain or may or may not see our strategy.

So, you know, the economically rational thing to do is, is to become a vertically integrated searcher builder, right?

And so you have entities that are well established, this is not a secret, that are very large trading operations.

And in particular, there's something called sex-dex arbitrage, which is arbitraging between prices on centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges, which by the way, centralized exchanges can update their prices very rapidly.

Decentralized exchanges can only update their prices every 12 seconds.

So unsurprisingly, when there's a price displacement between those 2, if you're a well capitalized and sophisticated actor, you can make profit from this.

And by the way, this is net beneficial to the network because they help align prices.

But why if you are doing sex tax arbitrage, would you share your transactions with somebody else?

Why would you share your profits with somebody else?

It's just you're economically incentivized to operate your own builder to not socialize your transaction.

So you can build blocks that nobody else can build because you have transactions that nobody else has because they're yours.

It plays itself out in all sorts of other interesting ways where you could have builders that create relationships with wallets to get exclusive order flow, and therefore have access to transactions that nobody else does, and therefore can build blocks that nobody else does, therefore can get margin.

And so What was theorized at the beginning of the merge was that there should be a healthy competitive market full of various layers with everybody sort of independent.

And it turned out in reality it didn't really play out that way.

And that's part of the reason why We competed in this market quite favorably.

We were at times north of 10% share, but ultimately there was no money in it.

You bid a little more in order to win the right for the block and the anticipation is you're making money on the trading behind, but we're not a trading entity.

And then there's also actors like these relays, these really critical operators.

There's only a handful of them that basically do this really economically valuable and security valuable thing for the network, but they don't get paid at all.

And they're perceived as public goods, even though they're very clear economic beneficiaries that when the protocol was set up, there were not any fees or any sort of mechanism for them to monetize.

And so it turns out that It's pretty expensive to operate a relay.

It's quite critical for the orderly operations of the network, but there's no money to be made there.

It's actually negative margin because you take on risk associated with being a relay, and we can talk about that and some of the regulatory concerns there.

And then if the relay doesn't do its job and there's a missed slot.

There's only so much time to do things in.

And the validator or staking pool doesn't receive the block body, they demand a refund for a service they don't pay for.

And so literally, I would talk about, and I've talked about this quite extensively.

Relays are critical for the operation of the network, but they're 100% risk, 0% reward.

And again, you know, we were hopeful that we could find out some inline economic incentive models to make that sustainable, but we weren't able to get there and didn't feel like we're going to get there anytime soon.

And so we made the difficult decision to suspend our relay last week.

Okay, so that was some great context as well there, especially as it pertains to like the economic side of things, because that's kind of what a lot of this core ideas are built off is like the rational actor will make this economic decision.

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Don't forget to mention ZeroX Research for a free web to pen test with your partnership and reach out to Hexens at hexens.io, find them in the links in the show notes or reach out to them at permission list.

But without further ado, let's get back to today's episode.

That kind of brings me to the idea of like private order flow and you kind of alluded to this a little bit, but do we have any idea how prevalent the private order flow is?

Are the largest builders today, is their edge having private order flow and so they can build more or they can extract more value from these blocks that other builders don't have access to because they have this extra order flow?

So we have BlockNative have published research that said, you know, it was a little while ago they published it, but over the course of the past 6 months, the amount of private orders, meaning transactions, which do not appear in the public mempool, but then do appear on chain, grew from about 2% to about 15%.

And when I surveyed the audience at MEV Day at ECC in Paris, generally everyone thought that that trend would continue.

And in a year or so, we'd be at about 50% private transactions, right, as a mechanism of protection.

And so certainly private transactions are a growing phenomenon, a fact of life today.

The reason why you have a private transaction is you're trying to avoid some of these concerns about adverse settlement and your transaction being part of some sort of MEV attack.

And actually, we've subsequently published some research that says it may not be so cut and dried because you generally wait longer for a private transaction to get on chain, and therefore you may suffer worse settlement due to increased slippage.

Sometimes it's better to be in the public mempool, sometimes it's not, and how to do it.

But certainly the notion of proprietary order flow, which is a subset of private transactions.

Proprietary order flow is orders that only 1 builder or some subset of builders may have, right?

Either it's because it's self-generated, i.e.

They're the trader, they have their own transactions, they don't socialize them to the rest of the network.

And again, the idea is then you can build a more valuable block than somebody else can.

There's also things like, again, you pay for order flow, which is not unlike what Citadel does with Robinhood, right?

Where you can have wallets that basically share orders with a limited subset of network participants to give them exclusive rights to either trade against that, i.e.

Extract MEV and or to build blocks from that.

And there's very real money changing hands today for those exclusive rights.

If I have access to orders that you don't, I can create trades that you can't.

And oh, by the way, we went through the example of if we all can see the opportunity, then we just bid against each other, it gets a lot more expensive.

But if only I can see the opportunity, then I can make a much more profitable trade because I don't have to worry about you guys competing with me.

And that very much is a fact of life today.

This has negative consequences for the decentralization of the network.

There's a really smart team called Special Mechanisms Group, Max Resnick and his team.

And they published research that showed that when asset volatility on Binance went up, there was a specific builder that won 75% of the blocks.

And you go, well, what's the problem with that?

You go, well, what if that builder doesn't like you?

Or more realistically, what if you're a competitor to that builder, that You have similar strategies, but the only way for you to get on chain is to give your order to that builder.

And that builder says, no, I have a better, I have my own order.

And I'm just going to pretend like I didn't see yours because I make more money that way.

And so it's economically rational for these actors to behave in this way.

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How Wallets Are MEV Sleeping Giants | Matt Cutler - Blocknative