Meetup notes

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Objectives

The goal of this RIG Open Problem (ROP) is to develop a practical framework to monitor Ethereum supply chain health rooted in data specifications, analyses, to discuss and create tested and robust metrics. We aim to create publicly accessible, open-source resources for monitoring and analyzing the interactions and behaviors of users, researchers, developers, relayers, and proposers within the Ethereum ecosystem.

It all starts with measuring the most important quantities and asking the right questions. The battle for blockspace is playing out in front of our eyes and community projects have done an incredible job at visualizing available information from onchain data, mev-boost, mempool, relay data, censorship resistance and validator metrics. However, if we want data to help us diagnose the magnitude of the various problems described in the post and design robust solutions, we need refined metrics that give us more insight on supply chain structure and value flows between participants.

General discussions will take place on the ROP Matrix server. Irregular meetups to be conducted, when syncing live becomes productive.

The objective is to establish and delineate project objectives and ownership among ROP participants, enabling iterative progress, as opposed to meticulous planning prior to initiating work. Running with an idea and sharing progress along the way is encouraged, and the RIG will provide mentoring and help whenever it’s needed (don’t hesitate to reach out to @soispoke or @davidecrapis for questions).

Resources

The talk MEV Resilient Ethereum at ETHDenver introduced a framework to measure the different types of MEV and their effect on ecosystem participants (slides here). We then published a post that expands on and asks how we can make Ethereum resilient and robust to MEV-induced incentives?

We also published a post on Estimating inclusion delays for censored transactions to give an example of analyses that can be conducted to estimate the impact censoring relays have on inclusion time (IT) for censored transactions.

Questions we would like to answer

• How can we measure censorship? In its various forms.
• How can we measure centralizing properties like exclusive order flow? And market concentration at different layers of the supply chain?
• Does the MEV process create an incentive to validators to deviate from honest behavior? Is it observed in practice?
• Which types of honest users/transactions are most affected by MEV? How much of the extracted value do they get back?
• Is the framework exhaustive? Are there properties that are not captured?

To give a clearer idea, here is a small example of metrics that could be defined:

• searcher take = bundle MEV - bundle inclusion cost
• builder take = block MEV - winning bid