Pitch

Execution tickets are a promising pathway to improve stakeholder alignment, foster validator decentralization and internalize MEV, however the economic mechanisms of execution slot allocation needs to be carefully designed and scenarios analyzed to avoid unintended second-order effects.

Abstract

Execution tickets are currently discussed as a promising way to improve validator and block space related incentive structures by separating slots into beacon and execution rounds with different attesting committees. This is done to (a) foster decentralization among validators and (b) to capture MEV at the protocol level. Therefore, MEV rewards are detangled from the validator payoffs. The validator set will still be entitled to beacon block production. However, for the execution round, slots to propose blocks have to explicitly be purchased from the protocol, e.g. by buying execution tickets. To ensure incentive alignments and no misbehavior the purchasing mechanism needs to be carefully designed. We aim to explore this by using a top-down approach of first analyzing the overall mechanism requirements, then the specific attributes, investigating pricing and simulating different configurations.

Resources

Neuder, M. (2023, December). Summary of Execution Tickets. Retrieved from https://ethresear.ch/t/execution-tickets/17944

Leonardos, et al. (2021). Dynamical Analysis of the EIP-1559 Ethereum Fee Market. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.10567.pdf

Reijsbergen, et al. (2022). Transaction Fees on a Honeymoon: Ethereum’s EIP-1559 One Month Later. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.04753.pdf

Leonardos, et al. (2022). Optimality Despite Chaos in Fee Markets. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.07175.pdf

Monnot, B. (2023, September). Analysis of Incentives with Inclusion Lists. Retrieved from https://ethresear.ch/t/fun-and-games-with-inclusion-lists/16557

Monnot, B. EIP 1559: A Transaction Fee Market Proposal. Retrieved from https://ethereum.github.io/abm1559/notebooks/eip1559.html

Buterin, Vitalik (2019). ETH Pricing. Retrieved from https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/papers/pricing/ethpricing.pdf

Project details

Work in progress by Pascal Stichler and Chris Haug.